Schur–Weyl duality ($V^{\otimes n}={⨁}_{\lambda ⊢n}{S}^{\lambda }\otimes D_{\lambda }(V)$)

The commuting actions of the symmetric group and the general linear group on a tensor power are mutual commutants. The displayed sum ranges over partitions with at most $\dim V$ rows. The Specht modules and Schur modules are the simple factors for the two actions. In particular a primitive Young symmetrizer selects one copy of the matching Schur module.

For the unitary group $U(n)$ with $n\ge 3$, the third tensor power of its defining representation decomposes as displayed. The first two summands have highest weights $(3,0,\dots )$ and $(1,1,1,0,\dots )$ and dimensions $\left(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{n+2}{3}\right)$ and $\left(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{n}{3}\right)$. The mixed summand has highest weight $(2,1,0,\dots )$ and dimension $n(n^2-1)/3$. In the three-dimensional weight space spanned by permutations of $e_1\otimes e_1\otimes e_2$, the vectors killed by all positive root vectors have coefficient sum zero, giving multiplicity two. For $n=2$, the exterior cube vanishes and $V_{(2,1)}=\det \otimes {\mathbb{C}}^2$.

If $\sigma$ has ${\alpha }_r$ cycles of length $r$, contraction of matrix entries around its cycles gives $\mathrm{tr}(\sigma {\xi }^{\otimes n})={\prod }_r\mathrm{tr}({\xi }^r{)}^{{\alpha }_r}$. The formula holds for every endomorphism, not only diagonalizable ones. The Schur–Weyl duality decomposition equates it with a sum of products of Specht and Schur characters.

The standard-tableau right-ideal decomposition of $\mathbb{C}{S}_n$, tensored over that algebra with $V^{\otimes n}$, gives this direct sum of general linear group modules. With $e_t=h_t/H_{\lambda }$, the map $e_t\mathbb{C}{S}_n\otimes T\to e_{t}T$ is an isomorphism. Individual summands generally need not be symmetric group submodules; instead each is a Schur module for the commuting action.