A new family of irreducible subgroups of the orthogonal algebraic groups

Abstract

Let $n\ge 3,$ and let $Y$ be a simply connected, simple algebraic group of type $D_{n+1}$ over an algebraically closed field $K.$ Also let $X$ be the subgroup of type $B_n$ of $Y,$ embedded in the usual way. In this paper, we correct an error in a proof of a theorem of Seitz, resulting in the discovery of a new family of triples $(X,Y,V),$ where $V$ denotes a finite-dimensional, irreducible, rational $KY$-module, on which $X$ acts irreducibly. We go on to investigate the impact of the existence of the new examples on the classification of the maximal closed connected subgroups of the classical algebraic groups.