Rational Mackey functors for compact lie groups I

A Mackey functor M is a structure analogous to the representationring functor H R(H) encoding good formal behaviour under inductionand restriction. More explicitly, M associates an abelian groupM(H) to each closed subgroup H of a fixed compact Lie groupG, and to each inclusion K H it associates a restriction map and an induction map . This paper gives an analysis of thecategory of Mackey functors M whose values are rational vectorspaces: such a Mackey functor may be specified by giving a suitablycontinuous family consisting of a Q ₀(W_G(H))-module V(H) foreach closed subgroup H with restriction maps V(K) V(K) wheneverK is normal in K and K/K is a torus (a ‘continuous Weyl-toralmodule’). We show that the category of rational Mackeyfunctors is equivalent to the category of rational continuousWeyl-toral modules. In Part II this will be used to give analgebraic analysis of the category of rational Mackey functors,showing in particular that it has homological dimension equalto the rank of the group. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification:19A22, 20C99, 22E15, 55N91, 55P42, 55P91.