Signature characters of invariant Hermitian forms on irreducible Verma modules and Hall-Littlewood polynomials (Q2633134)

This paper studies signature characters of Verma modules. The main result asserts that, in the case when the real form is compact and the highest weight is regular and is in a translation of the fundamental alcove, the signature character of the invariant Hermitian form on the irreducible Verma module is equal to the negative of a summand of the corresponding Hall-Littlewood polynomial evaluated at $q=-1$ times a factor similar to the Weyl denominator. Signature characters of irreducible highest weight modules are also shown to be related to Kazhdan-Lusztig basis elements.