Uncertainty Principles for Compact Groups

We establish an operator-theoretic uncertainty principle over arbitrary compact groups, generalizing several previous results. As a consequence, we show that if f is in L^2(G), then the product of the measures of the supports of f and its Fourier transform ^f is at least 1; here, the dual measure is given by the sum, over all irreducible representations V, of d_V rank(^f(V)). For finite groups, our principle implies the following: if P and R are projection operators on the group algebra C[G] such that P commutes with projection onto each group element, and R commutes with left multiplication, then the squared operator norm of PR is at most rank(P)rank(R)/|G|.