Let $G$ be a complex connected reductive algebraic group. Let $G/B$ denote the flag variety of $G$. Let $H$ be an algebraic subgroup of $G$ such that the set ${\bf H}(G/B)$ of the $H$-orbits in $G/B$ is finite ; $H$ is said to be {\it spherical}. These orbits are of importance in representation theory and in the geometry of the $G$-equivariant embeddings of $G/H$.
In 1995, F. Knop has defined an action of the Weyl group $W$ of $G$ on ${\bf H}(G/B)$. The aim of this note is to construct natural invariants separating the $W$-orbits of Knop's action.
Let G be a connected reductive complex algebraic group and B a Borel subgroup of G. We consider a subgroup H of B acting with finitely many orbits on the flag variety G/B, and we classify the H-orbits in G/B in terms of suitable combinatorial invariants. As well, we study the Weyl group action defined by Knop on the set of H-orbits in G/B, and we give a combinatorial model for this action in terms of weight polytopes.
A finite Coxeter group $W$ has a natural metric $d$ and if $\mathcal{M}$ is a subset of $W$, then for each $u\in W$, there is $q\in \mathcal{M}$ such that $d(u,q)=d(u,\mathcal{M})$. Such $q$ is not unique in general but if $\mathcal{M}$ is a Coxeter matroid, then it is unique, and we define a retraction $\mathcal{R}^m_{\mathcal{M}}\colon W\to \mathcal{M}\subset W$ so that $\mathcal{R}^m_{\mathcal{M}}(u)=q$. The $T$-fixed point set $Y^T$ of a $T$-orbit closure $Y$ in a flag variety $G/B$ is a Coxeter matroid, where $G$ is a semisimple algebraic group, $B$ is a Borel subgroup, and $T$ is a maxim…
In the present notes we generalize the classical work of Demazure [Invariants symétriques entiers des groupes de Weyl et torsion] to arbitrary oriented cohomology theories and formal group laws. Let G be a split semisemiple linear algebraic group over a field and let T be its split maximal torus. We construct a generalized characteristic map relating the so called formal group ring of the character group of T with the cohomology of the variety of Borel subgroups of G. The main result of the paper says that the kernel of this map is generated by W-invariant elements, where W is the Weyl group o…
We provide a proof that every Schubert variety of a semi-infinite flag variety is projectively normal. This gives us an interpretation of a Demazure module of a global Weyl module of a current Lie algebra as the (dual) space of the space of global sections of a semi-infinite Schubert variety. Moreover, we give geometric realizations of Feigin-Makedonskyi's generalized Weyl modules, and the $t = \infty$ specialization of non-symmetric Macdonald polynomials.
In this paper, we discuss some partitions of affine flag varieties. These partitions include as special cases the partition of affine flag variety into affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties and the affine analogue of the partition of flag varieties into $\cb_w(b)$ introduced by Lusztig in \cite{L1} as part of the definition of character sheaves. Among other things, we give a formula for the dimension of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties for classical loop groups in terms of degrees of class polynomials of extended affine Hecke algebra. We also prove that any simple $GL_n(\FF_q((\e)))$-module occurs …
We study the toric degeneration of Weyl group translated Schubert divisors of a partial flag variety of Lie type A via Gelfand-Cetlin polytopes. We propose a conjecture that Schubert varieties of appropriate dimensions intersect transversally up to translation by Weyl group elements, and verify it in various cases, including complex Grassmannian Gr(2, n) and complete flag variety Fl_4.
Let G be a semisimple algebraic group over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic p. Generalizing the construction of the PBW filtration on Weyl modules for G we construct a G-stable filtration on tensor products of Weyl modules which we call the induced PBW filtration. We use this filtration to give some purely representation-theoretic conditions which are equivalent to the existence of a Frobenius splitting of the double flag variety $G/B \times G/B$ that maximally compatibly splits the diagonal. In particular, this gives a sufficient condition for Wahl's conjecture to hold…
We study the nonnegative part B_{\ge 0} of the flag variety of a reductive algebraic group G, as defined by Lusztig. Using positivity properties of the canonical basis it is shown that B_{\ge 0} has an algebraic cell decomposition indexed by pairs w\le w' of the Weyl group. This result was conjectired by Lusztig in [Lu; Progress in Math 123].
This paper is concerned with the study of spaces of naturally defined cycles associated to SL(n,R)-flag domains. These are compact complex submanifolds in open orbits of real semisimple Lie groups in flag domains of their complexification. It is known that there are optimal Schubert varieties which intersect the cycles transversally in finitely many points and in particular determine them in homology. Here we give a precise description of these Schubert varieties in terms of certain subsets of the Weyl group and compute their total number. Furthermore, we give an explicit description of the po…
We examine the relationship between the (double) Schubert polynomials of Billey-Haiman and Ikeda-Mihalcea-Naruse and the (double) theta and eta polynomials of Buch-Kresch-Tamvakis and Wilson from the perspective of Weyl group invariants. We obtain generators for the kernel of the natural map from the corresponding ring of Schubert polynomials to the (equivariant) cohomology ring of symplectic and orthogonal flag manifolds.
Schubert varieties in the full flag variety of Kac-Moody type are indexed by elements of the corresponding Weyl group. We give a practical criterion for when two such Schubert varieties (from potentially different flag varieties) are isomorphic, in terms of the Cartan matrix and reduced words for the indexing Weyl group elements. As a corollary, we show that two such Schubert varieties are isomorphic if and only if there is an isomorphism between their integral cohomology rings that preserves the Schubert basis.
We obtain an algorithm computing the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson (CSM) classes of Schubert cells in a generalized flag manifold G/B. In analogy to how the ordinary divided difference operators act on Schubert classes, each CSM class of a Schubert class is obtained by applying certain Demazure-Lusztig type operators to the CSM class of a cell of dimension one less. These operators define a representation of the Weyl group on the homology of G/B. By functoriality, we deduce algorithmic expressions for CSM classes of Schubert cells in any flag manifold G/P. We conjecture that the CSM classes of Sch…
Flag domains are open orbits of real semisimple Lie groups in flag manifolds of their complexifications. Certain group theoretically defined compact complex submanifolds, which are regarded as cycles, are of basic importance for their complex geometric and representation theoretic properties. It is known that there are optimal Schubert varieties which intersect the cycles transversally in finitely many points and in particular determine them in homology. Here we give a precise description of these Schubert varieties in terms of certain subsets of the Weyl group and compute their total number f…
Schubert varieties in finite dimensional flag manifolds G/P are a well-studied family of projective varieties indexed by elements of the corresponding Weyl group W. In particular, there are many tests for smoothness and rational smoothness of these varieties. One key result due to Lakshmibai-Sandhya is that in type A the smooth Schubert varieties are precisely those that are indexed by permutations that avoid the patterns 4231 and 3412. Recently, there has been a flurry of research related to the infinite dimensional analogs of flag manifolds corresponding with G being a Kac-Moody group and W …
We unify results of Artin, Brieskorn, Slodowy and others by showing that, in all characteristics, the Artin component of the deformation space of a rational surface singularity has a ramified cover where simultaneous resolution exists and the Galois group of this cover is the Weyl group determined by the configuration of $(-2)$-curves in the minimal resolution. This verifies a conjecture made by Burns and Rapoport. We use an integral version of this to show that certain actions of Weyl groups on polynomial rings over the integers give rings of invariants that are also polynomial, and deduce th…
Affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties can be thought of as affine analogs of classical Deligne-Lusztig varieties, or Frobenius-twisted analogs of Schubert varieties. We provide a method for proving a non-emptiness statement for affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties inside the affine flag variety associated to affine Weyl group elements satisfying a certain length additivity hypothesis. In particular, we prove that non-emptiness holds whenever it is conjectured to do so for alcoves in the shrunken dominant Weyl chamber, providing a partial converse to the emptiness results of Goertz, Haines, Kottwitz, an…
A stratified variety has a Kazhdan-Lusztig atlas if it can be locally modelled with Kazhdan-Lusztig varieties stratified by Schubert varieties in some Kac-Moody flag manifold via stratified isomorphisms. In this paper, we show that the partial flag manifold $G/P$ with the projected Richardson stratification has a Kazhdan-Lusztig atlas, with each chart stratified-isomorphic to a Kazhdan-Lusztig variety in the affine flag manifold of the formal loop group $\widehat{G}$ of $G$. This result generalizes that of Snider's on $Gr(k,n)$ with the positroid stratification, and is a geometric counterpart …
Let $G$ be a connected reductive algebraic group over an algebraically closed field ${\bf k}$ of characteristic not equal to 2, let $\B$ be the variety of all Borel subgroups of $G$, and let $K$ be a symmetric subgroup of $G$. Fixing a closed $K$-orbit in $\B$, we associate to every $K$-orbit on $\B$ some subsets of the Weyl group of $G$, and we study them as invariants of the $K$-orbits. When ${\bf k} = {\mathbb C}$, these invariants are used to determine when an orbit of a real form of $G$ and an orbit of a Borel subgroup of $G$ have non-empty intersection in $\B$. We also characterize the i…
Let $G$ be a connected reductive group over a perfect field $k$ acting on an algebraic variety $X$ and let $P$ be a minimal parabolic subgroup of $G$. For $k$-spherical $G$-varieties we prove finiteness result for $P$-orbits that contain $k$-points. This is a consequence of an equality on $P$-complexities of $X$ and of any $P$-invariant $k$-dense subvariety in $X$, which generalizes a corresponding result of E.B.Vinberg in the case of algebraically closed field $k$. Also we introduce an action of the restricted Weyl group $W$ on the set of $k$-dense $P$-invariant closed subvarieties of $X$ of …
Let $G$ denote a reductive algebraic group over $\mathbb{C}$ and $x$ a nilpotent element of its Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$. The Springer variety $\mathcal{B}_x$ is the closed subvariety of the flag variety $\mathcal{B}$ of $G$ parameterizing the Borel subalgebras of $\mathfrak{g}$ containing $x$. It has the remarkable property that the Weyl group $W$ of $G$ admits a representation on the cohomology of $\mathcal{B}_x$ even though $W$ rarely acts on $\mathcal{B}_x$ itself. Well-known constructions of this action due to Springer et al use technical machinery from algebraic geometry. The purpose o…
The purpose of this note is to give a refinement of the product formula proved in [1] for the Poincare polynomial of a smooth Schubert variety in the flag variety of an algebraic group G over C. This yields a factorization of the number of elements in a Bruhat interval [e,w] in the Weyl group W of G provided the Schubert variety associated to w is smooth. This gives an elementary necessary condition for a Schubert variety in the flag variety to be smooth.
Let G be a simply-connected simple compact Lie group over the complex numbers. The affine Grassmannian is a projective ind-variety, homotopy-equivalent to the loop space of G and closely analogous to a maximal flag variety of the classical Grassmannian manifold. It has a Schubert cell decomposition indexed by the coroot lattice or equivalently by the minimal length coset representatives for the affine Weyl group modulo the Weyl group for G. The closure of an affine Schubert cell is a finite dimensional projective variety that we call an affine Schubert variety. In this paper we completely dete…
Let G be a semi-simple simply connected group over complex numbers. In this paper we give a geometric definition of the (dual) Weyl modules over the group G[t] and show that their characters form an eigen-function of the lattice version of the q-Toda integrable integrable system (defined by means of the quantum group version of Kostant-Whittaker reduction due to Etingof and Sevostyanov). All the proofs are algebro-geometric and rely on our previous work which interprets the universal eigen-function of the q-Toda system in terms of rings of functions on the spaces of based quasi-maps from P^1 t…
We give an explicit combinatorial Chevalley-type formula for the equivariant K-theory of generalized flag varieties G/P which is a direct generalization of the classical Chevalley formula. Our formula implies a simple combinatorial model for the characters of the irreducible representations of G and, more generally, for the Demazure characters. This model can be viewed as a discrete counterpart of the Littelmann path model, and has several advantages. Our construction is given in terms of a certain R-matrix, that is, a collection of operators satisfying the Yang-Baxter equation. It reduces to …
Kazhdan-Lusztig-Stanley polynomials are a combinatorial generalization of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials of for Coxeter groups that include g-polynomials of polytopes and Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials of matroids. In the cases of Weyl groups, rational polytopes, and realizable matroids, one can count points over finite fields on flag varieties, toric varieties, or reciprocal planes to obtain cohomological interpretations of these polynomials. We survey these results and unite them under a single geometric framework.
For each infinite series of the classical Lie groups of type B,C or D, we introduce a family of polynomials parametrized by the elements of the corresponding Weyl group of infinite rank. These polynomials represent the Schubert classes in the equivariant cohomology of the appropriate flag variety. They satisfy a stability property, and are a natural extension of the (single) Schubert polynomials of Billey and Haiman, which represent non-equivariant Schubert classes. They are also positive in a certain sense, and when indexed by maximal Grassmannian elements, or by the longest element in a fini…
Let $G=PSp(2n, \mathbb C)(n\geq 3)$ and $B$ be a Borel subgroup of $G$ containing a maximal torus $T$ of $G$. Let $w$ be an element of the Weyl group $W$ and $X(w)$ be the Schubert variety in the flag variety $G/B$ corresponding to $w$. Let $Z(w,\underline i)$ be the Bott-Samelson-Demazure-Hansen variety (the desingularization of $X(w)$) corresponding to a reduced expression $\underline i$ of $w$. In this article, we study the cohomology groups of the tangent bundle on $Z(w_0, \underline i)$, where $w_0$ is the longest element of the Weyl group $W$. We describe all the reduced expressions $\un…
Let G be a classical complex Lie group, P any parabolic subgroup of G, and X = G/P the corresponding homogeneous space, which parametrizes (isotropic) partial flags of subspaces of a fixed vector space. In the mid 1990s, Fulton, Pragacz, and Ratajski asked for global formulas which express the cohomology classes of the universal Schubert varieties in flag bundles -- when the space X varies in an algebraic family -- in terms of the Chern classes of the vector bundles involved in their definition. This has applications to the theory of degeneracy loci of vector bundles and is closely related to …
In the present paper we investigate a new class of infinite-dimensional modules over the hyperalgebra of a semi-simple algebraic group in positive chararacteristic called quasi-Verma modules. We provide a purely algebraic construction of the global Grothendieck-Cousin complex corresponding to the standard line bumdle ${\mathcal L}(λ)$ on the Flag variety of the algebraic group stratified by Schubert cells. We prove that the complex consists of direct sums of quasi-Verma modules for the highest weights of the form $w\cdotλ$ for various elements $w$ of the Weyl group.
We consider tangent cones to Schubert subvarieties of the flag variety $G/B$, where $B$ is a Borel subgroup of a reductive complex algebraic group $G$ of type $E_6$, $E_7$ or $E_8$. We prove that if $w_1$ and $w_2$ form a good pair of involutions in the Weyl group $W$ of $G$ then the tangent cones $C_{w_1}$ and $C_{w_2}$ to the corresponding Schubert subvarieties of $G/B$ do not coincide as subschemes of the tangent space to $G/B$ at the neutral point.
The aim of this article is to present a smoothness criterion for Schubert varieties in generalized flag manifolds $G/B$ in terms of patterns in root systems. We generalize Lakshmibai-Sandhya's well-known result that says that a Schubert variety in $SL(n)/B$ is smooth if and only if the corresponding permutation avoids the patterns 3412 and 4231. Our criterion is formulated uniformly in general Lie theoretic terms. We define a notion of pattern in Weyl group elements and show that a Schubert variety is smooth (or rationally smooth) if and only if the corresponding element of the Weyl group avoi…
In this expository paper we describe a powerful combinatorial formula and its implications in geometry, topology, and algebra. This formula first appeared in the appendix of a book by Andersen, Jantzen, and Soergel. Sara Billey discovered it independently five years later, and it played a prominent role in her work to evaluate certain polynomials closely related to Schubert polynomials. Billey's formula relates many pieces of Schubert calculus: the geometry of Schubert varieties, the action of the torus on the flag variety, combinatorial data about permutations, the cohomology of the flag vari…
Iwahori-Coulomb branches, stable envelopes, and quantum cohomology of cotangent bundles of flag varieties
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Department of Mathematics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学数学科学研究所及数学系）；Department of Mathematics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学数学系）；Max Planck Institute for Mathematics（马克斯·普朗克数学研究所）；Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学数学系）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Let $G=PSO(2n+1, \mathbb{C}) (n \ge 3)$ and $B$ be the Borel subgroup of $G$ containing maximal torus $T$ of $G.$ Let $w$ be an element of Weyl group $W$ and $X(w)$ be the Schubert variety in the flag variety $G/B$ corresponding to $w.$ Let $Z(w, \underline{i})$ be the Bott-Samelson-Demazure-Hansen variety (the desingularization of $X(w)$) corresponding to a reduced expression $\underline{i}$ of $w.$ In this article, we study the cohomology modules of the tangent bundle on $Z(w_{0}, \underline{i}),$ where $w_{0}$ is the longest element of the Weyl group $W.$ We describe all the reduced express…
Let $G$ be a simple algebraic group of adjoint type over $\mathbb{C},$ whose root system is of type $F_{4}.$ Let $T$ be a maximal torus of $G$ and $B$ be a Borel subgroup of $G$ containing $T.$ Let $w$ be an element of Weyl group $W$ and $X(w)$ be the Schubert variety in the flag variety $G/B$ corresponding to $w.$ Let $Z(w, \underline{i})$ be the Bott-Samelson-Demazure-Hansen variety (the desingularization of $X(w)$) corresponding to a reduced expression $\underline{i}$ of $w.$ In this article, we study the cohomology modules of the tangent bundle on $Z(w_{0}, \underline{i}),$ where $w_{0}$ i…
