Is every locally compact abelian group which admits a symplectic self-duality isomorphic to the product of a locally compact abelian group and its Pontryagin dual? Several sufficient conditions, covering all the typical applications are found. Counterexamples are produced by studying a seemingly unrelated question about the structure of maximal isotropic subgroups of finite abelian groups with ...

The space of states and operators for a large class of background independent theories of quantum spacetime dynamics is defined. The SU(2) spin networks of quantum general relativity are replaced by labelled compact two-dimensional surfaces. The space of states of the theory is the direct sum of the spaces of invariant tensors of a quantum group Gq over all compact (finite genus) oriented 2-sur...

S.L. Woronowicz proved in 1991 that quantum SU(1,1) does not exist as a locally compact quantum group. Results by L.I. Korogodsky in 1994 and more recently by Woronowicz gave strong indications that the normalizer S̃U(1, 1) of SU(1, 1) in SL(2,C) is a much better quantization candidate than SU(1, 1) itself. In this paper we show that this is indeed the case by constructing S̃Uq(1, 1), a new examp...