Character Expansions in Physics

Abstract

Expanding products of invariant functions of a group element as a series in the basis of characters of the irreducible representations of a group is widely used in many areas of physics and related fields. In this contribution a formula to generate such expansions and its various applications are briefly reviewed.Comment: To be published in "Symmetries in Nature: Symposium in Memoriam Marcos Moshinsky", August 2010, Cuernavaca, Mexic