NONCOMPACT GROUPS OF HERMITIAN SYMMETRIC TYPE AND FACTORIZATION

We investigate Birkhoff (or triangular) factorization and (what we propose to call) root subgroup factorization for elements of a noncompact simple Lie group Go of Hermitian symmetric type. For compact groups root subgroup factorization is related to Bott-Samelson desingularization, and many striking applications have been discovered by Lu ([5]). In this paper, in the noncompact Hermitian symmetric case, we obtain parallel characterizations of the Birkhoff components of Go and an analogous construction of root subgroup coordinates for the Birkhoff components. As in the compact case, we show that the restriction of Haar measure to the top Birkhoff component is a product measure in root subgroup coordinates.