The character field theory and homology of character varieties (Q2278869)

The two main motivations of this paper are, on the one hand, the importance of the cohomology of character varieties of complex reductive groups, due to its rich structure (as shown in the works of Hausel, Rodriguez-Villegas and Letellier, for instance), and on the other hand by the fact that the cobordism hypothesis may be interpreted as the assertion that extended topological field theories are completely determined by the higher category formed by boundary conditions and their interfaces. With these ideas in mind, the authors propose a short but intense paper where they construct an extended oriented topological field theory, the character field theory \(\mathbf{X}_G\) attached to an affine algebraic group in characteristic zero, which calculates the homology of character varieties of surfaces. Such a theory is a model for a dimensional reduction of Kapustin-Witten theory and a universal version of the unipotent character field theory introduced by the authors in a previous preprint. Boundary conditions in \(\mathbf{X}_G\) are given by quantum Hamiltonian \(G\)-spaces, as captured by de Rham (or strong) \(G\)-categories. The authors show that the circle integral \(\mathbf{X}_G(S^1)\) is identified with the category of class \(D\)-modules, while for an oriented surface \(S\) (with arbitrary decorations at punctures) they show that \(\mathbf{X}_G(S)\) is the Borel-Moore homology of the corresponding character stack. The authors also describe the ``Hodge filtration'' on the character theory, a one parameter degeneration to a TFT whose boundary conditions are given by classical Hamiltonian \(G\)-spaces, and which encodes a variant of the Hodge filtration on character varieties. The paper is quite short, and this means that it is intense and demanding. Furthermore, it has plenty of ideas including the conjecture that asserts that the naive Hodge filtration on the Borel-Moore homology of character stacks for complex reductive group \(G\) agrees fith the filtration in the sense of mixed Hodge structure.