Comparison of quiver varieties, loop Grassmannians and nilpotent cones in type \(A\) (with an appendix by Vasily Krylov) (Q2166322)

In the article under review, the authors find equivalences of geometries arising in three settings: Nakajima's quiver varieties, conjugacy classes of matrices, and loop Grassmannians. They embed the quiver varieties into Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmannians. That is, they identify certain normal slices to standard stratifications in the three settings, so in particular the singularities are the same in all three cases. The authors also identify natural resolutions of slices. This provides a compactification of Nakajima varieties and a decomposition of affine Grassmannians into Nakajima varieties. As an application, Mirković and Vybornov provide a geometric version of symmetric and skew \((\textsf{GL}(m), \textsf{GL}(n))\) dualities. One should note that these observations may not extend beyond type \(A\), with one reason being the closures of orbits in the loop Grassmannian are normal; however, it is not true for nilpotent orbits.