Characters of the unitriangular group and the Mackey method

Abstract

Let $U$ be the unitriangular group over a finite field. We consider an interesting class of irreducible complex characters of $U$, so-called characters of depth 2. This is a next natural step after characters of maximal and submaximal dimension, whose description is already known. We explicitly describe the support of a character of depth 2 by a system of defining algebraic equations. After that, we calculate the value of such a character on an element from the support. The main technical tool used in the proofs is the Mackey little group method for semidirect products.

30 pages