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Related concepts
exceptional structures, exceptional isomorphisms
exceptional finite rotation groups:
and Kac-Moody groups:
exceptional Jordan superalgebra,
The tetrahedral group is the finite symmetry group of a tetrahedron.
As a symmetry group of one of the Platonic solids, the tetrahedral group participates in the ADE pattern:
ADE classification and McKay correspondence
More in detail, there are variants of the tetrahedral group corresponding to the stages of the Whitehead tower of O(3):
the full tetrahedral group is the subgroup of O(3)
which is the stabilizer of the standard embedding of the tetrahedron into Cartesian space ;
the rotational tetrahedral group is the restriction to orientation-preserving symmetries, hence to SO(3); this is isomorphic to the alternating group ;
next the binary tetrahedral group is the double cover, hence the lift of to Spin(3) SU(2), this is equivalently the special linear group over the prime field
then there is a string 2-group lift of the tetrahedral group to a Platonic 2-group (Epa 10, Epa-Ganter 16)
The binary tetrahedral group is, up to isomorphism, the subgroup of the group SU(2) of unit quaternions consisting of the 8 unit quaternions , , , and the 16 unit quaternions given by where .
(These are also the vertices that span the 24-cell as a convex regular polytope in ).
The full tetrahedral group is isomorphic to the symmetric group of permutations of four elements (see Full tetrahedral group is isomorphic to S4).
The subgroup of orientation-preserving symmetries is isomorphic to the alternating group .
The group order is:
(quaternion group inside binary tetrahedral group)
The binary tetrahedral group contains the quaternion group of order 8, hence the binary dihedral group of order 8, as a subgroup, in fact as a normal subgroup:
In fact the only finite subgroups of SU(2) which contain as a proper subgroup are the exceptional ones, hence the binary tetrahedral group, the binary octahedral group and the binary icosahedral group.
See this Prop at quaternion group.
ADE classification and McKay correspondence
linear representation theory of binary tetrahedral group
conjugacy classes: | 1 | -1 | a | b | c | d | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
their cardinality: | 1 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
let be a third root of unity,
e.g. , notice that
character table over the complex numbers
irrep | 1 | -1 | a | b | c | d | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
1 | 1 | 1 | |||||
1 | 1 | 1 | |||||
3 | 3 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
2 | -2 | 0 | |||||
2 | -2 | 0 | |||||
2 | -2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -1 | -1 |
character table over the real numbers
irrep | 1 | -1 | a | b | c | d | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
2 | 2 | 2 | -1 | -1 | -1 | -1 | |
3 | 3 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
4 | -4 | 0 | -1 | -1 | 1 | 1 | |
4 | -4 | 0 | 2 | 2 | -2 | -2 |
References
Bockland, Character tables and McKay quivers (pdf)
The group cohomology of the tetrahedral group is discussed in Groupprops, Tomoda & Zvengrowski 08, Sec. 4.1 Kirdar 13, Epa & Ganter 16, p. 12.
Discussion in the context of classification of finite rotation groups goes back to:
Exposition:
See also:
Discussion of the group cohomology:
Satoshi Tomoda, Peter Zvengrowski, Remarks on the cohomology of finite fundamental groups of 3-manifolds, Geom. Topol. Monogr. 14 (2008) 519-556 (arXiv:0904.1876)
Mehmet Kirdar, On The K-Ring of the Classifying Space of the Symmetric Group on Four Letters (arXiv:1309.4238)
Discussion of higher central extension to Platonic 2-groups is in
Narthana Epa, Platonic 2-groups, 2010 (pdf)
Narthana Epa, Nora Ganter, Platonic and alternating 2-groups, (arXiv:1605.09192)
Last revised on September 2, 2021 at 08:34:53. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.