Stepwise Square Integrable Representations: the Concept and Some Consequences

There are some new developments on Plancherel formula and growth of matrix coefficients for unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups. These have several consequences for the geometry of weakly symmetric spaces and analysis on parabolic subgroups of real semisimple Lie groups, and to (infinite dimensional) locally nilpotent Lie groups. Many of these consequences are still under development. In this note I'll survey a few of these new aspects of representation theory for nilpotent Lie groups and parabolic subgroups.