- #1
jfy4
- 649
- 3
Hi,
I would like to study [itex]SL(3,\mathbb{R})[/itex] a little. I was motivated to look into them a bit because of their volume-preserving nature. Now this group has [itex]n^2-1=9-1=8[/itex] generators and I found out through some reading that three of them are the generators for rotation (duh Judah, volume preserving), and the other five have to do with stretching. Both of these can be represented as spherical tensors, one as [itex]T^{(1)}_{m}[/itex] and the other as [itex]T^{(2)}_{m}[/itex] for [itex]-l\leq m\leq l[/itex]. So these other five generators are a 2x2 symmetric traceless tensor. Now for the life of me, I can't find out what these other five generators do in real life. What's their physical interpretation explicitly?
My thinking was that the xy, yz, xz components of the symmetric traceless tensor are the generators for shearing, and xx, yy, zz, are something goofy having to do with another type of stretching, with the additional constraint that [itex]T_{xx}+T_{yy}+T_{zz}=0[/itex] . But, I'm not sure.
On top of that, I would like to find out how to write out the infinitesimal generators, much like [itex]L_{z}=\partial_{\phi}[/itex], but for the other five generators.
Does anyone know a good book, that would cover how to develop such generators, and can anyone lend me some physics insight into what these generators each do?
Thanks,
I would like to study [itex]SL(3,\mathbb{R})[/itex] a little. I was motivated to look into them a bit because of their volume-preserving nature. Now this group has [itex]n^2-1=9-1=8[/itex] generators and I found out through some reading that three of them are the generators for rotation (duh Judah, volume preserving), and the other five have to do with stretching. Both of these can be represented as spherical tensors, one as [itex]T^{(1)}_{m}[/itex] and the other as [itex]T^{(2)}_{m}[/itex] for [itex]-l\leq m\leq l[/itex]. So these other five generators are a 2x2 symmetric traceless tensor. Now for the life of me, I can't find out what these other five generators do in real life. What's their physical interpretation explicitly?
My thinking was that the xy, yz, xz components of the symmetric traceless tensor are the generators for shearing, and xx, yy, zz, are something goofy having to do with another type of stretching, with the additional constraint that [itex]T_{xx}+T_{yy}+T_{zz}=0[/itex] . But, I'm not sure.
On top of that, I would like to find out how to write out the infinitesimal generators, much like [itex]L_{z}=\partial_{\phi}[/itex], but for the other five generators.
Does anyone know a good book, that would cover how to develop such generators, and can anyone lend me some physics insight into what these generators each do?
Thanks,