Abelian ideals in a Borel subalgebra of a complex simple Lie algebra (Q1879011)

Let \({\mathfrak g}\) be a complex simple Lie algebra and \({\mathfrak b}\) a fixed Borel subalgebra of \(\mathfrak g\). The work by \textit{B. Kostant} [Int. Math. Res. Not. 1998, No. 5, 225--252 (1998; Zbl 0896.17002)] can be considered the starting point of much recent investigation on the set of abelian ideals of \({\mathfrak b} ({\mathfrak b}\)-ideals). Kostant's work is partly based on a simple result due to D. Peterson that describes the set of abelian \({\mathfrak b}\)-ideals through elements in a certain subset of the affine Weyl group of \({\mathfrak g}\) (with respect to a root system for which the roots of \({\mathfrak b}\) are positive); that subset has been described by \textit{P. Cellini} and \textit{P. Papi} [J. Algebra 225, No. 1, 130--141 (2000; Zbl 0951.17003)]. In this paper, another uniform description of abelian ideals in Borel subalgebras is given by the author. The description is based on the use of certain integral weights arising on the geometry of the affine Weyl group (\(\rho\)-points) and the establishment of a correspondence between the set of positive long roots of \({\mathfrak g}\) and the set of abelian \({\mathfrak b}\)-ideals (a similar correspondence was also obtained in [\textit{D. I. Panyushev}, Int. Math. Res. Not. 2003, No. 35, 1889--1913 (2003; Zbl 1067.17004)]). In this way, the main results on the paper allow the author to recover, as a corollary, the celebrated Peterson's theorem about the number of abelian ideals of Borel subalgebras in simple complex algebras, to establish a dimensionality formula for those abelian ideals with maximal dimension and to give a geometric approach on the result due to \textit{D. I. Panyushev} and \textit{G. Röhrle} [Adv. Math. 159, No. 2, 229--246 (2001; Zbl 0993.22016)] about that the number of maximal ideals in \({\mathfrak b}\) equals the number of long simple roots in \({\mathfrak g}\). The paper also described the automorphism group of the Hasse diagram of the poset of all abelian \({\mathfrak b}\)-ideals. Some of the results of this paper are reviewed in [\textit{P. Cellini} and \textit{P. Papi}, Abelian ideals of Borel subalgebras and affine Weyl groups, Adv. Math. 187, No. 2, 320--361 (2004; Zbl 1112.17011)].