On the topology of components of some Springer fibers and their relation to Kazhdan-Lusztig theory

We describe the irreducible components of Springer fibers for hook and two-row nilpotent elements of gl_n(C) as iterated bundles of flag manifolds and Grassmannians. We then relate the topology (in particular, the intersection homology Poincare' polynomials) of the intersections of these components with the inner products of the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis elements of irreducible representations of the rational Iwahori-Hecke algebra of type A corresponding to the hook and two-row Young shapes.Comment: This work has been submitted to Advances in Mathematics (Academic Press) for possible publication

Shadows of characteristic cycles, Verma modules, and positivity of Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of Schubert cells

Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson (CSM) classes generalize to singular and/or noncompact varieties the classical total homology Chern class of the tangent bundle of a smooth compact complex manifold. The theory of CSM classes has been extended to the equivariant setting by Ohmoto. We prove that for an arbitrary complex projective manifold $X$, the homogenized, torus equivariant CSM class of a constructible function $\varphi$ is the restriction of the characteristic cycle of $\varphi$ via the zero section of the cotangent bundle of $X$. This extends to the equivariant setting results of Ginzburg and Sabbah. We specialize $X$ to be a (generalized) flag manifold $G/B$. In this case CSM classes are determined by a Demazure-Lusztig (DL) operator. We prove a `Hecke orthogonality' of CSM classes, determined by the DL operator and its Poincar{\'e} adjoint. We further use the theory of holonomic $\mathcal{D}_X$-modules to show that the characteristic cycle of a Verma module, restricted to the zero section, gives the CSM class of the corresponding Schubert cell. Since the Verma characteristic cycles naturally identify with the Maulik and Okounkov's stable envelopes, we establish an equivalence between CSM classes and stable envelopes; this reproves results of Rim{\'a}nyi and Varchenko. As an application, we obtain a Segre type formula for CSM classes. In the non-equivariant case this formula is manifestly positive, showing that the expansion in the Schubert basis of the CSM class of a Schubert cell is effective. This proves a previous conjecture by Aluffi and Mihalcea, and it extends previous positivity results by J. Huh in the Grassmann manifold case. Finally, we generalize all of this to partial flag manifolds $G/P$.Comment: 40 pages; main changes in v2: removed some unnecessary compactness hypotheses; added remarks 7.2 and 9.6 explaining how orthogonality of characteristic cycles for transversal Schubert cell stratifications leads to orthogonality of stable envelopes and that of CSM classe

Toda lattice, cohomology of compact Lie groups and finite Chevalley groups

In this paper, we describe a connection that exists among (a) the number of singular points along the trajectory of Toda flow, (b) the cohomology of a compact subgroup $K$, and (c) the number of points of a Chevalley group $K({\mathbb F}_q)$ related to $K$ over a finite field ${\mathbb F}_q$. The Toda lattice is defined for a real split semisimple Lie algebra $\mathfrak g$, and $K$ is a maximal compact Lie subgroup of $G$ associated to $\mathfrak g$. Relations are also obtained between the singularities of the Toda flow and the integral cohomology of the real flag manifold $G/B$ with $B$ the Borel subgroup of $G$ (here we have $G/B=K/T$ with a finite group $T$). We also compute the maximal number of singularities of the Toda flow for any real split semisimple algebra, and find that this number gives the multiplicity of the singularity at the intersection of the varieties defined by the zero set of Schur polynomials.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure