Past Algebra Seminar

Work of Bezrukavnikov-Kazhdan-Varshavsky uses an equivariant system of trivial idempotents of Moy-Prasad groups to obtain an
Euler-Poincare formula for the r-depth Bernstein projector. We establish an Euler-Poincare formula for the projector to an individual depth zero Bernstein component in terms of an equivariant system of Peter-Weyl idempotents of parahoric subgroups P associated to a block of the reductive quotient of P.  This work is joint with Dan Barbasch and Dan Ciubotaru.
 

The local Langlands correspondence for classical groups gives a natural finite-to-one map between certain representations of p-adic classical groups and certain self-dual representations of the absolute Weil group of a p-adic field (and more). On both sides of the correspondence, the description of the representations involves a ``wild part'' of more arithmetic nature and a ``tame part'' of more geometric nature, and the notion of endo-parameter (due to Bushnell--Henniart for general linear groups) is designed to describe the ``wild part'' of the Langlands correspondence. I will explain what this means and the connection with representations of affine Hecke algebras. This is joint work with Blondel--Henniart, with Lust, and with Kurinczuk--Skodlerack.

 For a group algebra over a self-injective ring
there are two stable categories: the usual one modulo projectives
and a relative one where one works modulo representations
which are free over the coefficient ring.
I'll describe the connection between these two stable categories,
which are "birational" in an appropriate sense.
I'll then make some comments on the specific case
where the coefficient ring is Z/nZ and give a more
precise description of the relative stable category.

What are the irreducible constituents of a smooth representation of a p-adic group that is constructed through parabolic induction? In the case of GL_n this is the study of the multiplicative behaviour of irreducible representations in the Bernstein-Zelevinski ring. Strikingly, the same decomposition problem can be reformulated through various Lie-theoretic settings of type A, such as canonical bases in quantum groups, representations of affine Hecke algebras, quantum affine Lie algebras, or more recently, KLR algebras. While partially touching on some of these phenomena, I will present new results on the problem using mostly classical tools. In particular, we will see how introducing a width invariant to an irreducible representation can circumvent the complexity involved in computations of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

It has long been expected, and is now proved in many important cases, 
that quantum algebras are more rigid than their classical limits. That is, they 
have much smaller automorphism groups. This begs the question of whether this 
broken symmetry can be recovered.

I will outline an approach to this question using the ideas of noncommutative 
projective geometry, from which we see that the correct object to study is a 
groupoid, rather than a group, and maps in this groupoid are the replacement 
for automorphisms. I will illustrate this with the example of quantum 
projective space.

This is joint work with Nicholas Cooney (Clermont-Ferrand).

In this talk, we consider a split connected semisimple group G defined over a global field F. Let A denote the ring of adèles of F and K a maximal compact subgroup of G(A) with the property that the local factors of K are hyperspecial at every non-archimedian place. Our interest is to study a certain subspace of the space of square-integrable functions on the adelic quotient G(F)\G(A). Namely, we want to study functions coming from induced representations from an unramified character of a Borel subgroup and which are K-invariant.

Our goal is to describe how the decomposition of such space can be related with the Plancherel decomposition of a graded affine Hecke algebra (GAHA).

The main ingredients are standard analytic properties of the Dedekind zeta-function as well as known properties of the so-called residue distributions, introduced by Heckman-Opdam in their study of the Plancherel decomposition of a GAHA and a result by M. Reeder on the support of the weight spaces of
the anti-spherical  discrete series representations of affine Hecke algebras. These last ingredients are of a purely local nature.

This talk is based on joint work with V. Heiermann and E. Opdam.

Given a complex vector space $V$, consider the ring $R_{a,b}(V)$ of polynomial functions on the space of configurations of $a$ vectors and $b$ covectors which are invariant under the natural action of $SL(V)$. Rings of this type play a central role in representation theory, and their study dates back to Hilbert. Over the last three decades, different bases of these spaces with remarkable properties were found. To explicitly construct, as well as to compare, some of these bases remains a challenging problem, already open when $V$ is 3-dimensional. 
In this talk, I report on recent developments in the 3-dimensional setting of this theory.

We define categorical matrix factorizations in a suspended additive category, 
with respect to a central element. Such a factorization is a sequence of maps 
which is two-periodic up to suspension, and whose composition equals the 
corresponding coordinate map of the central element. When the category in 
question is that of free modules over a commutative ring, together with the 
identity suspension, then these factorizations are just the classical matrix 
factorizations. We show that the homotopy category of categorical matrix 
factorizations is triangulated, and discuss some possible future directions. 
This is joint work with Dave Jorgensen.

Torsion in homology are invariants that have received increasing attention over the last twenty years, by the work of Lück, Bergeron, Venkatesh and others. While there are various vanishing results, no one has found a finitely presented group where the torsion in the first homology is exponential over a normal chain with trivial intersection. On the other hand, conjecturally, every 3-manifold group should be an example.

A group is right angled if it can be generated by a list of infinite order elements, such that every element commutes with its neighbors. Many lattices in higher rank Lie groups (like SL(n,Z), n>2) are right angled. We prove that for a right angled group, the torsion in the first homology has subexponential growth for any Farber sequence of subgroups, in particular, any chain of normal subgroups with trivial intersection. We also exhibit right angled cocompact lattices in SL(n,R) (n>2), for which the Congruence Subgroup Property is not known. This is joint work with Nik Nikolov and Tsachik Gelander.

We will introduce the Thurston norm in the setting of 3-manifold groups, and show how the techniques coming from L2-homology allow us to extend its definition to the setting of free-by-cyclic groups.
We will also look at the relationship between this Thurston norm and the Alexander norm, and the BNS invariants, in particular focusing on the case of ascending HNN extensions of the 2-generated free group.

In 1878, Jordan showed that there is a function f on the set of natural numbers such that, if $G$ is a finite subgroup of $GL(n,C)$, then $G$ has an abelian normal subgroup of index at most $f(n)$. Early bounds were given by Frobenius and Schur, and close to optimal bounds were given by Weisfeiler in unpublished work in 1984 using the classification of finite simple groups; about ten years ago I obtained the optimal bounds. Crucially, these are "absolute" bounds; they do not address the wider question of divisibility of orders.

In 1887, Minkowski established a bound for the order of a Sylow p-subgroup of a finite subgroup of GL(n,Z). Recently, Serre asked me whether I could obtain Minkowski-like results for complex linear groups, and posed a very specific question. The answer turns out to be no, but his suggestion is actually quite close to the truth, and I shall address this question in my seminar. The answer addresses the divisibility issue in general, and it turns out that a central technical theorem on the structure of linear groups from my earlier work which there was framed as a replacement theorem can be reinterpreted as an embedding theorem and so can be used to preserve divisibility.

The class of multiserial algebras contains many well-studied examples of algebras such as the intensely-studied biserial and special biserial algebras. These, in turn, contain many of the tame algebras arising in the modular representation theory of finite groups such as tame blocks of finite groups and all tame blocks of Hecke algebras. However, unlike  biserial algebras which are of tame representation type, multiserial algebras are generally of wild representation type. We will show that despite this fact, we retain some control over their representation theory.

A subgroup Gamma of a semisimple algebraic group G is called strongly dense if every subgroup of Gamma is either cyclic or Zariski-dense. I will describe a method for building strongly dense free subgroups inside a given Zariski-dense subgroup  Gamma of G, thus providing a refinement of the Tits alternative. The method works for a large class of G's and Gamma's. I will also discuss connections with word maps and expander graphs. This is joint work with Bob Guralnick and Michael Larsen.

The prime spectrum of a quantum algebra has a finite stratification in terms
of a set of distinguished primes called H-primes, and we can study these
strata by passing to certain nice localizations of the algebra.  H-primes
are now starting to show up in some surprising new areas, including
combinatorics (totally nonnegative matrices) and physics, and we can borrow
techniques from these areas to answer questions about quantum algebras and
their localizations.    In particular, we can use Grassmann necklaces -- a
purely combinatorial construction -- to study the topological structure of
the prime spectrum of quantum matrices.

The formal degree is a fundamental invariant of a discrete series representation which generalizes the notion of dimension from finite dimensional representations. For discrete series with unipotent cuspidal support, a formula for formal degrees, conjectured by Hiraga-Ichino-Ikeda, was verified by Opdam (2015). For split exceptional groups, this formula was previously known from the work of Reeder (2000). I will present a different interpretation of the formal degrees of unipotent discrete series in terms of the nonabelian Fourier transform (introduced by Lusztig in the character theory of finite groups of Lie type) and certain invariants arising in the elliptic theory of the affine Weyl group. This interpretation relates to recent conjectures of Lusztig about `almost characters' of p-adic groups. The talk is based on joint work with Eric Opdam.

Graded affine Hecke algebras were introduced by Lusztig for studying the representation theory of p-adic groups. In particular, some problems about extensions of representations of p-adic groups can be transferred to problems in the graded Hecke algebra setting. The study of extensions gives insight to the structure of various reducible modules. In this talk, I shall discuss some methods of computing Ext-groups for graded Hecke algebras.
The talk is based on arXiv:1410.1495, arXiv:1510.05410 and forthcoming work.

Abstract: This is a joint work with E. Breuillard.

A conjecture of Breuillard asserts that for every positive integer d, there is a positive constant c such that the following holds. Let S be a finite subset of GL(d,C) that generates a group, which is not virtually nilpotent. Then |S^n|>exp(cn) for all n.
Considering an algebraic number a that is not a root of unity and the semigroup generated by the affine transformations x-> ax+1, x-> ax+1, the above conjecture implies that the Mahler measure of a is at least 1+c' for some c'>0 depending on c. This property is known as Lehmer's conjecture.

I will talk about the converse of this implication, namely that Lehmer's conjecture implies the uniform growth conjecture of
Breuillard.

Our work (which is joint with Simon Smith) began as a study of the structure of infinite permutation groups $G$ in which point stabilisers are finite and all infinite normal subgroups are transitive. That led to two variations.
 

One is the generalisation in which point stabilisers are merely assumed to satisfy min-{\sc N}, the minimal condition on normal subgroups. The groups $G$ are then of two kinds. Either they have a maximal finite normal subgroup, modulo which they have either one or two minimal non-trivial normal subgroups, or they have a regular normal subgroup $M$ which is a divisible abelian $p$-group of finite rank. In the latter case the point stabilisers are finite and act irreducibly on the socle of~$M$. This leads to our second variation, which is a study of the finite linear groups that can arise.

Our work (which is joint with Simon Smith) began as a study of the structure of infinite permutation groups $G$ in which point stabilisers are finite and all infinite normal subgroups are transitive. That led to two variations. One is the generalisation in which point stabilisers are merely assumed to satisfy min-{\sc N}, the minimal condition on normal subgroups. The groups $G$ are then of two kinds. Either they have a maximal finite normal subgroup, modulo which they have either one or two minimal non-trivial normal subgroups, or they have a regular normal subgroup $M$ which is a divisible abelian $p$-group of finite rank. In the latter case the point stabilisers are finite and act irreducibly on the socle of~$M$. This leads to our second variation, which is a study of the finite linear groups that can arise.

We investigate equivalence relations for quadratic forms that can be expressed in terms of algebro-geometric properties of their associated quadrics, more precisely, birational, stably birational and motivic equivalence, and isomorphism of quadrics. We provide some examples and counterexamples and highlight some important open problems.

Quiver varieties, as introduced by Nakaijma, play a key role in representation theory. They give a very large class of symplectic singularities and, in many cases, their symplectic resolutions too. However, there seems to be no general criterion in the literature for when a quiver variety admits a symplectic resolution. In this talk I will give necessary and sufficient conditions for a quiver variety to admit a symplectic resolution.  This result is based on work of Crawley-Bouvey and of Kaledin, Lehn and Sorger. The talk is based on joint work with T. Schedler.
 

 If $R = F_q[t]$ is the polynomial ring over a finite field
then the group $SL_2(R)$ is not finitely generated. The group $SL_3(R)$ is
finitely generated but not finitely presented, while $SL_4(R)$ is
finitely presented. These examples are facets of a larger picture that
I will talk about.