Buildings and Hecke algebras

This paper investigates the connections between buildings and Hecke algebras through the combinatorial study of two algebras spanned by averaging operators on buildings. As a consequence we obtain a geometric and combinatorial description of certain Hecke algebras, and in particular of the Macdonald spherical functions and the center of affine Hecke algebras. The results of this paper are used in later work to study spherical harmonic analysis on affine buildings, and to study isotropic random walks on affine buildings

Shadows in Coxeter groups

For a given $w$ in a Coxeter group $W$ the elements $u$ smaller than $w$ in Bruhat order can be seen as the end-alcoves of stammering galleries of type $w$ in the Coxeter complex $\Sigma$. We generalize this notion and consider sets of end-alcoves of galleries that are positively folded with respect to certain orientation $\phi$ of $\Sigma$. We call these sets shadows. Positively folded galleries are closely related to the geometric study of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties, MV polytopes, Hall-Littlewood polynomials and many more agebraic structures. In this paper we will introduce various notions of orientations and hence shadows and study some of their algorithmic properties.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, revised and final versio