Square Integrable Representation of Groupoids

A notion of an irreducible representation, as well as of a square integrable representation on an arbitrary locally compact groupoid, is introduced. A generalization of a version of Schur.s lemma on a locally compact groupoid is given. This is used in order to extend some well-known results from locally compact groups to the case of locally compact groupoids. Indeed, we have proved that if L is a continuous irreducible representation of a compact groupoid G defined by a continuous Hilbert bundle . = {H u }u..G 0, then each H u is finite dimensional. It is also shown that if L is an irreducible representation of a principal locally compact groupoid defined by a Hilbert bundle (G 0, {H u }, .), then dimH u = 1 (u .. G 0). Furthermore it is proved that every square integrable representation of a locally compact groupoid is unitary equivalent to a subrepresentation of the left regular representation. Furthermore, for r-discrete groupoids, it is shown that every irreducible subrepresentation of the left regular representation is square integrable.