Irreducible decompositions of unitary representations of infinite- dimensional groups

This paper concerns the problem of irreducible decompositions of unitary representations of topological groups G, including the group Diff0(M) of diffeomorphisms with compact support on smooth manifolds M. It is well known that the problem is affirmative, when G is a locally compact, separable group (cf. [3, 4]). We extend this result to infinite-dimensional groups with appropriate quasi-invariant measures, and, in particular, we show that every continuous unitary representation of Diff0(M) has an irreducible decomposition under a fairly mild condition.