Homotopy of cohomological Casimir operators and Bott's theorem for Kac- Moody algebras (Q1891725)

Let \({\mathfrak g}\) be a symmetrizable Kac-Moody Lie algebra and let \(V\), \(M\) be two restricted \({\mathfrak g}\)-modules. A \({\mathfrak g}\)-module \(V\) is said to be restricted if the set \(\{\alpha\in \Delta_+\): \({\mathfrak g}_\alpha v\neq 0\}\) is finite for any \(v\in V\), where \(\Delta_+\) is the set of positive roots of \({\mathfrak g}\) and \({\mathfrak g}_\alpha\) is the root space.) Let \(\Omega_V\) (resp. \(\Omega_M\)) be the Casimir operator of \(V\) (resp. \(M\)). These operators give rise to the cochain maps \(\Omega_V^\cdot\) and \(\Omega_M^\cdot\) of the cochain complex \(C^\cdot ({\mathfrak g},{\mathfrak b}; \Hom_\mathbb{C} (V, M)):= \Hom_{U( {\mathfrak b})} (\Lambda^\cdot ({\mathfrak g}/ {\mathfrak b}), \Hom_\mathbb{C} (V, M))\), for the Lie algebra pair \(({\mathfrak g},{\mathfrak b})\) with coefficients in the \({\mathfrak g}\)-module \(\Hom_\mathbb{C} (V, M)\), defined below: \[ (\Omega_V^\cdot (T) (\eta)) (v)= T(\eta) (\Omega_V (v)), \qquad (\Omega_M^\cdot (T) (\eta)) (v)= \Omega_M (T (\eta) (v)), \] for any \(\eta\in \Lambda^\cdot ({\mathfrak g}/ {\mathfrak b})\), \(v\in V\), where \({\mathfrak b}\) is the standard Borel subalgebra of \({\mathfrak g}\). It is well known (from the general homological algebra considerations) that the cochain maps \(\Omega_V^\cdot\) and \(\Omega_M^\cdot\) are cochain-homotopic. The main result of the paper under review gives an explicit homotopy between the two. The author gives some consequences of his homotopy result in Corollaries (2.9), (2.10), and Theorem (3.3). But these results are well known and do not require the use of an explicit homotopy. (Existence of one homotopy between \(\Omega_V^\cdot\) and \(\Omega_M^\cdot\) is enough to derive these results).