Parabolic category O, perverse sheaves on Grassmannians, Springer fibres and Khovanov homology

For a fixed parabolic subalgebra p of gl(n,C) we prove that the centre of the principal block O(p) of the parabolic category O is naturally isomorphic to the cohomology ring of the corresponding Springer fibre. We give a diagrammatic description of O(p) for maximal parabolic p and give an explicit isomorphism to Braden's description of the category Perv_B(G(n,n)) of perverse sheaves on Grassmannians. As a consequence Khovanov's algebra H^n is realised as the endomorphism ring of some object from Perv_B(G(n,n)) which corresponds under localisation and the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence to a full projective-injective module in the corresponding category $O(p)$. From there one can deduce that Khovanov's tangle invariants are obtained from the more general functorial invariants involving category O by restriction.Comment: 39 pages, 9 figures, added a few remark

Matroid lifts and representability

A 1965 result of Crapo shows that every elementary lift of a matroid $M$ can be constructed from a linear class of circuits of $M$. In a recent paper, Walsh generalized this construction by defining a rank-$k$ lift of a matroid $M$ given a rank-$k$ matroid $N$ on the set of circuits of $M$, and conjectured that all matroid lifts can be obtained in this way. In this sequel paper we simplify Walsh's construction and show that this conjecture is true for representable matroids but is false in general. This gives a new way to certify that a particular matroid is non-representable, which we use to construct new classes of non-representable matroids. Walsh also applied the new matroid lift construction to gain graphs over the additive group of a non-prime finite field, generalizing a construction of Zaslavsky for these special groups. He conjectured that this construction is possible on three or more vertices only for the additive group of a non-prime finite field. We show that this conjecture holds for four or more vertices, but fails for exactly three

On functors associated to a simple root

Associated to a simple root of a finite-dimensional complex semisimple Lie algebra, there are several endofunctors (defined by Arkhipov, Enright, Frenkel, Irving, Jantzen, Joseph, Mathieu, Vogan and Zuckerman) on the BGG category O. We study their relations, compute cohomologies of their derived functors and describe the monoid generated by Arkhipov's and Joseph's functors and the monoid generated by Irving's functors. It turns out that the endomorphism rings of all elements in these monoids are isomorphic. We prove that the functors give rise to an action of the singular braid monoid on the bounded derived category of Oo. We also use Arkhipov's, Joseph's and Irving's functors to produce new generalized tilting modules