A hyperoctahedral group is any member of a sequence of classical orthogonal matrix groups.
For every the hyperoctahedral group for dimension can be defined as the subgroup of the general linear group given by all orthogonal -matrices with integer entries, i.e., the set
where, if , then is the complex conjugate of and the transpose and where is the identity -matrix.
The hyperoctahedral group for dimension , where , can also be defined as the wreath product of groups with respect to the natural action , where is the symmetric group and where is the cyclic group of order .
Given a set , two groups and and a group action of on the (unrestricted) wreath product of and with respect to is the semi-direct product of groups of the direct product group over and with respect to the group homomorphism .
If and are groups and a group homomorphism from to the group of group automorphisms of , then the (outer) semi-direct product of and with respect to is the group with underlying set , the cartesian product of and , and with group law .
For the hyperoctahedral group this means that is given by the group with underlying set and group law .
The hyperoctahedral groups are an easy family of compact matrix quantum groups, i.e., the intertwiner spaces of their corepresentation categories are induced by a category of partitions. More precisely, it is the category of partitions with blocks of even size that induces the corepresentation categories of . Its canonical generating set of partitions is .