Weight decomposition ($V={⨁}_{\lambda }{V}_{\lambda }$)

For a representation on which a commuting torus or Cartan action is semisimple, the weight decomposition is the direct sum of simultaneous weight spaces. A finite-dimensional representation of a compact torus can be made unitary by Haar measure averaging; its commuting unitary matrices are simultaneously diagonalizable. Each diagonal character is an integral weight of a representation. The decomposition makes tensor and exterior-power weights additive. For nonsemisimple actions, simultaneous generalized eigenspaces give a generalized weight decomposition instead.