Tridiagonal pairs of shape (1, 2, 1)

Let denote a field and let V denote a vector space over with finite positive dimension. We consider a pair of linear transformations A:V→V and A^*:V→V that satisfies the following conditions: (i) each of A,A^* is diagonalizable; (ii) there exists an ordering of the eigenspaces of A such that A^*V_iV_i-1+V_i+V_i+1 for 0id, where V_-1=0 and V_d+1=0; (iii) there exists an ordering of the eigenspaces of A^* such that for 0iδ, where and ; (iv) there is no subspace W of V such that AWW, A^*WW, W≠0,W≠V. We call such a pair a tridiagonal pair on V. It is known that d=δ and that for 0id the dimensions of coincide; we denote this common value by ρ_i. The sequence is called the shape of the pair. In this paper we assume the shape is (1,2,1) and obtain the following results. We describe six bases for V; one diagonalizes A, another diagonalizes A^*, and the other four underlie the split decompositions for A,A^*. We give the action of A and A^* on each basis. For each ordered pair of bases among the six, we give the transition matrix. At the end we classify the tridiagonal pairs of shape (1,2,1) in terms of a sequence of scalars called the parameter array.