Fundamentals of Poisson Lie Groups with Application to the Classical Double

We give a constructive account of the fundamental ingredients of Poisson Lie theory as the basis for a description of the classical double group D. The double of a group G has a pointwise decomposition D ∼ G × G * , where G and G * are Lie subgroups generated by dual Lie algebras which form a Lie bialgebra. The double is an example of a factorisable Poisson Lie group, in the sense of Reshetikhin and Semenov-Tian-Shansky [1], and usually the study of its Poisson structures is developed only in the case when the subgroup G is itself factorisable. We give an explicit description of the Poisson Lie structure of the double without invoking this assumption. This is achieved by a direct calculation, in infinitesimal form, of the dressing actions of the subgroups on each other, and provides a new and general derivation of the Poisson Lie structure on the group G *. For the example of the double of SU(2), the symplectic leaves of the Poisson Lie structures on SU(2) and SU(2) * are displayed.