Idempotents in representation rings of quivers

Abstract

For an acyclic quiver Q, we solve the Clebsch-Gordan problem for the projective representations by computing the multiplicity of a given indecomposable projective in the tensor product of two indecomposable projectives. Motivated by this problem for arbitrary representations, we study idempotents in the representation ring of Q (the free abelian group on the indecomposable representations, with multiplication given by tensor product). We give a general technique for constructing such idempotents and for decomposing the representation ring into a direct product of ideals, utilizing morphisms between quivers and categorical Mobius inversion. © 2012 by Mathematical Sciences Publishers.