Representations of affine Kac-Moody groups over local and global fields: a survey of some recent results

Let G be a reductive algebraic group over a local field K or a global field F. It is well know that there exists a non-trivial and interesting representation theory of the group G(K) as well as the theory of automorphic forms on the corresponding adelic group. The purpose of this paper is to give a survey of some recent constructions and results, which show that there should exist an analog of the above theories in the case when G is replaced by the corresponding affine Kac-Moody group (which is essentially built from the formal loop group G((t)) of G). Specifically we discuss the following topics : affine (classical and geometric) Satake isomorphism, affine Iwahori-Hecke algebra, affine Eisenstein series and Tamagawa measure.