Grothendieck rings for Lie superalgebras and the Duflo-Serganova functor (Q1755592)

The Duflo-Serganova (DS) functor is a powerful tool in the representation theory of Lie superalgebras. Given a Lie superalgebra \(\mathfrak{g}\) and an odd element \(x\in\mathfrak{g}_{\overline{1}}\) such that \([x,x]=0\), \(x\) acts on every representation of \(\mathfrak{g}\) as a square-zero operator. Thus one may take the cohomology of \(x\) on any module, and this is the definition of the DS functor with respect to \(x\). We may in particular apply this functor to \(\mathfrak{g}\) under the adjoint representation, and we write \(\mathfrak{g}_x\) for the resulting supervector space, which is itself a Lie superalgebra. The DS functor then takes \(\mathfrak{g}\)-modules to \(\mathfrak{g}_x\)-modules. The DS functor is a tensor functor, however it is not exact, which often leads to many difficulties. In particular, it does not define a homomorphism of Grothendieck rings. In this article, the authors establish the important observation that the DS functor gives a well-defined ring homomorphism on a certain quotient of the Grothendieck ring of \(\mathfrak{g}\), namely by identifying the class of the trivial module with negative the class of its parity shift: \([\mathbb{C}]=-[\Pi\mathbb{C}]\). Write \(\mathcal{K}_{(-)}\) for this quotient ring. We then obtain a ring homomorphism \(ds_x:\mathcal{K}_{\mathfrak{g}}\to \mathcal{K}_{\mathfrak{g}_x}\). For many Lie superalgebras of interest (the basic classical ones), the algebra \(\mathcal{K}_{\mathfrak{g}}\) is exactly the ring of supercharacters of \(\mathfrak{g}\). Sergeev and Veselov provided explicit descriptions of these rings as algebras of polynomials. The authors consider the natural question of how to describe the ring homomorphism \(ds_x\) in terms of the algebras, and they prove that \(ds_x\) corresponds to evaluation along certain natural hyperplanes. They give an explicit description of a basis of the kernel of \(ds_x\) in terms of so-called Euler supercharacters, which for type I superalgebras are the supercharacters of Kac-modules. These Euler supercharacters have played an important role in the theory of character formulas for basic classical Lie superalgebras. Finally, the authors give an explicit description of the image of \(ds_x\), showing in particular it is surjective for the type ABCD Lie supergroups.