Unitary spherical representations of Drinfeld doubles

Abstract: We study irreducible spherical unitary representations of the Drinfeld double of a $q$-deformation of a connected simply connected compact Lie group, which can be considered as a quantum analogue of the complexification of the Lie group. In the case of $SU_q(3)$, we give a complete classification of such representations. As an application, we show the Drinfeld double of the quantum group $SU_q(2n+1)$ has property (T), which also implies central property (T) of the dual of $SU_q(2n+1)$.