Perverse Sheaves on affine Grassmannians and Langlands Duality

This is an expanded version of the text ``Perverse Sheaves on Loop Grassmannians and Langlands Duality'', AG/9703010. The main new result is a topological realization of algebraic representations of reductive groups over arbitrary rings. We outline a proof of a geometric version of the Satake isomorphism. Given a connected, complex algebraic reductive group G we show that the tensor category of representations of the Langlands dual group is naturally equivalent to a certain category of perverse sheaves on the loop Grassmannian of G. The above result has been announced by Ginsburg in and some of the arguments are borrowed from his approach. However, we use a more "natural" commutativity constraint for the convolution product, due to Drinfeld. Secondly, we give a direct proof that the global cohomology functor is exact and decompose this cohomology functor into a direct sum of weights. The geometry underlying our arguments leads to a construction of a canonical basis of Weyl modules given by algebraic cycles and an explicit construction of the group algebra of the dual group in terms of the affine Grassmannian. We completely avoid the use of the decomposition theorem which makes our techniques applicable to perverse sheaves with coefficients over an arbitrary commutative ring. We deduce the classical Satake isomorphism using the affine Grassmannian defined over a finite field. This note contains indications of proofs of some of the results. The details will appear elsewhere.Comment: Amstex, 12 page

The null-cone and cohomology of vector bundles on flag varieties

We study the null-cone of a semi-simple algebraic group acting on a number of copies of its Lie algebra via the diagonal adjoint action. We show that the null-cone has rational singularities in the case of $SL_3$.We observe by example that the null-cone is not normal in general and that the normalization of the null-cone does not have rational singularities in general. This is achieved by computing cohomology of certain vector bundles on flag varieties

Springer correspondence, hyperelliptic curves, and cohomology of Fano varieties

In \cite{CVX3}, we have established a Springer theory for the symmetric pair $(\operatorname{SL}(N),\operatorname{SO}(N))$. In this setting we obtain representations of (the Tits extension) of the braid group rather than just Weyl group representations. These representations arise from cohomology of families of certain (Hessenberg) varieties. In this paper we determine the Springer correspondence explicitly for IC sheaves supported on order 2 nilpotent orbits. In this process we encounter universal families of hyperelliptic curves. As an application we calculate the cohomolgy of Fano varieties of $k$-planes in the smooth intersection of two quadrics in an even dimensional projective space