The Paraboson Fock Space and Unitary Irreducible Representations of the Lie Superalgebra {\mathfrak{osp}(1|2n)}

It is known that the defining relations of the orthosymplectic Lie superalgebra are equivalent to the defining (triple) relations of n pairs of paraboson operators . In particular, with the usual star conditions, this implies that the “parabosons of order p” correspond to a unitary irreducible (infinite-dimensional) lowest weight representation V(p) of . Apart from the simple cases p = 1 or n = 1, these representations had never been constructed due to computational difficulties, despite their importance. In the present paper we give an explicit and elegant construction of these representations V(p), and we present explicit actions or matrix elements of the generators. The orthogonal basis vectors of V(p) are written in terms of Gelfand-Zetlin patterns, where the subalgebra of plays a crucial role. Our results also lead to character formulas for these infinite-dimensional representations. Furthermore, by considering the branching , we find explicit infinite-dimensional unitary irreducible lowest weight representations of and their characters. NIS was supported by a project from the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium) and by project P6/02 of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme (Belgian State – Belgian Science Policy). An erratum to this article can be found at