Anthony Henderson’s research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

We complete the construction of the modular generalized Springer correspondence for an arbitrary connected reductive group, with a uniform proof of the disjointness of induction series that avoids the case-by-case arguments for classical groups used in previous papers in the series. We show that the induction series containing the trivial local system on the regular nilpotent orbit is determined by the Sylow subgroups of the Weyl group. Under some assumptions, we give an algorithm for determining the induction series associated to the minimal cuspidal datum with a given central character. We also provide tables and other information on the modular generalized Springer correspondence for quasi-simple groups of exceptional type, including a complete classification of cuspidal pairs in the case of good characteristic, and a full determination of the corrrespondence in type $G_2$.

We study some aspects of modular generalized Springer theory for a complex reductive group G with coefficients in a field $\mathbb k$ under the assumption that the characteristic $\ell$ of $\mathbb k$ is rather good for G, i.e., $\ell$ is good and does not divide the order of the component group of the centre of G. We prove a comparison theorem relating the characteristic-$\ell$ generalized Springer correspondence to the characteristic-0 version. We also consider Mautner's characteristic-$\ell$ `cleanness conjecture'; we prove it in some cases; and we deduce several consequences, including a classification of supercuspidal sheaves and an orthogonal decomposition of the equivariant derived category of the nilpotent cone.

Let G be a connected reductive group over $\mathbb{C}$. We show that a certain involution of an open subset of the affine Grassmannian of G, defined previously by Achar and the author, corresponds to the action of the nontrivial Weyl group element of $\mathrm{SL}(2)$ on the framed moduli space of $\mathbb{G}_m$-equivariant principal G-bundles on $\mathbb{P}^2$. As a result, the fixed-point set of the involution can be partitioned into strata indexed by conjugacy classes of homomorphisms $N\to G$ where N is the normalizer of $\mathbb{G}_m$ in $\mathrm{SL}(2)$. In the case where $G=\mathrm{GL}(r)$, the strata are Nakajima quiver varieties $\mathfrak{M}_0^{\mathrm{reg}}(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{w})$ of type D.

This is an overview of our series of papers on the modular generalized Springer correspondence. It is an expansion of a lecture given by the second author in the Fifth Conference of the Tsinghua Sanya International Mathematics Forum, Sanya, December 2014, as part of the Master Lecture `Algebraic Groups and their Representations' Workshop honouring G. Lusztig. The material that has not appeared in print before includes some discussion of the motivating idea of modular character sheaves, and heuristic remarks about geometric functors of parabolic induction and restriction.

This is an expository article on the singularities of nilpotent orbit closures in simple Lie algebras over the complex numbers. It is slanted towards aspects that are relevant for representation theory, including Maffei's theorem relating Slodowy slices to Nakajima quiver varieties in type A. There is one new observation: the results of Juteau and Mautner, combined with Maffei's theorem, give a geometric proof of a result on decomposition numbers of Schur algebras due to Fang, Henke and Koenig.

We construct a modular generalized Springer correspondence for any classical group, by generalizing to the modular setting various results of Lusztig in the case of characteristic-0 coefficients. We determine the cuspidal pairs in all classical types, and compute the correspondence explicitly for $\mathrm{SL}(n)$ with coefficients of arbitrary characteristic and for $\mathrm{SO}(n)$ and $\mathrm{Sp}(2n)$ with characteristic-2 coefficients.

We show that the fixed-point subvariety of a Nakajima quiver variety under a diagram automorphism is a disconnected union of quiver varieties for the `split-quotient quiver' introduced by Reiten and Riedtmann. As a special case, quiver varieties of type D arise as the connected components of fixed-point subvarieties of diagram involutions of quiver varieties of type A. In the case where the quiver varieties of type A correspond to small self-dual representations, we show that the diagram involutions coincide with classical involutions of two-row Slodowy varieties. It follows that certain quiver varieties of type D are isomorphic to Slodowy varieties for orthogonal or symplectic Lie algebras.

We define a generalized Springer correspondence for the group GL(n) over any field. We also determine the cuspidal pairs, and compute the correspondence explicitly. Finally we define a stratification of the category of equivariant perverse sheaves on the nilpotent cone of GL(n) satisfying the `recollement' properties, and with subquotients equivalent to categories of representations of a product of symmetric groups.

We show that two Weyl group actions on the Springer sheaf with arbitrary coefficients, one defined by Fourier transform and one by restriction, agree up to a twist by the sign character. This generalizes a familiar result from the setting of l-adic cohomology, making it applicable to modular representation theory. We use the Weyl group actions to define a Springer correspondence in this generality, and identify the zero weight spaces of small representations in terms of this Springer correspondence.

For a split reductive group scheme G over a commutative ring k with Weyl group W, there is an important functor $Rep(G,k) \to Rep(W,k)$ defined by taking the zero weight space. We prove that the restriction of this functor to the subcategory of small representations has an alternative geometric description, in terms of the affine Grassmannian and the nilpotent cone of the Langlands dual group to G. The translation from representation theory to geometry is via the Satake equivalence and the Springer correspondence. This generalizes the result for the k=\C case proved by the first two authors, and also provides a better explanation than in that earlier paper, since the current proof is uniform across all types.