Braided and coboundary monoidal categories

In this expository paper, we discuss and compare the notions of braided and coboundary monoidal categories. Coboundary monoidal categories are analogues of braided monoidal categories in which the role of the braid group is replaced by the cactus group. We focus on the categories of representations of quantum groups and crystals and explain how while the former is a braided monoidal category, this structure does not pass to the crystal limit. However, the categories of representations of quantum groups of finite type also possess the structure of a coboundary category which does behave well in the crystal limit. We explain this construction and also a recent interpretation of the coboundary structure using quiver varieties. This geometric viewpoint allows one to show that the category of crystals is in fact a coboundary monoidal category for arbitrary symmetrizable Kac-Moody type.Comment: 24 pages; v2: minor typos corrected. To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Algebras, Representations and Applications" (Lie and Jordan Algebras, their Representations and Applications - III) in Honour of Prof. Ivan Shestakov's 60th Birthda

Quiver varieties and Demazure modules

Using subvarieties, which we call Demazure quiver varieties, of the quiver varieties of Nakajima, we give a geometric realization of Demazure modules of Kac-Moody algebras with symmetric Cartan data. We give a natural geometric characterization of the extremal weights of a representation and show that Lusztig's semicanonical basis is compatible with the filtration of a representation by Demazure modules. For the case of affine sl_2, we give a characterization of the Demazure quiver variety in terms of a nilpotency condition on quiver representations and an explicit combinatorial description of the Demazure crystal in terms of Young pyramids.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures; v2: Minor corrections and reference added; v3: Proofs of Proposition 6.1 and Theorem 8.1 corrected. This version incorporates an Erratum to the published versio

A survey of Heisenberg categorification via graphical calculus

In this expository paper we present an overview of various graphical categorifications of the Heisenberg algebra and its Fock space representation. We begin with a discussion of "weak" categorifications via modules for Hecke algebras and "geometrizations" in terms of the cohomology of the Hilbert scheme. We then turn our attention to more recent "strong" categorifications involving planar diagrammatics and derived categories of coherent sheaves on Hilbert schemes.Comment: 23 pages; v2: Some typos corrected and other minor improvements made; v3: Some small errors corrected; v4: Code corrected to fix problem with missing arrows on some diagram