On the irreducibility of the commuting variety of a reductive symmetric pair of rank 1 (Q1599926)

Let \(\mathfrak{g}\) be a reductive Lie algebra and \(\mathfrak{g=k\oplus p}\) a decomposition into a symmetric pair given by an involution \(\theta \). This paper addresses the question of when the commuting variety of \(\mathfrak{p}\), i.e. \(\mathcal{C}\left( \mathfrak{p}\right)=\{ (x,y)\in \mathfrak{g}\times \mathfrak{g}\mid [x,y]=0\}\), is irreducible. It is shown that the only reductive symmetric pairs of rank one for which the commuting variety is irreducible are the ones of the form \((\mathfrak{g},\mathfrak{k})=([ \mathfrak{p},\mathfrak{p}] \oplus \mathfrak{p},[ \mathfrak{p}, \mathfrak{p}]) =( \mathfrak{so}_{n+1}(\mathbb{C}), \mathfrak{so}_{n}(\mathbb{C}))\) for \(n>0\), and that any reductive pair of this form does have an irreducible commuting variety, proving a conjecture by T. Levasseur and D. Panyushev.