No label defined (Q4953450)

This series of lectures is intended to survey and provide the background for recent joint work of W. Schmid and the author that has appeared in the papers \textit{W. Schmid} and \textit{K. Vilonen} [Invent. Math. 124, 451-502 (1996; Zbl 0851.32011); J. Am. Math. Soc. 11, 799-876 (1998); Characteristic cycles and wave front cycles of representations of reductive Lie groups (to appear in Ann. Math.); On the geometry of nilpotent orbits (to appear in the Atiyah volume of Asian J. Math.)]. In Lecture 1 an overview of the lecture series is presented. Lectures 2 and 3 provide the necessary background material on sheaf theory and homological algebra. In Lectures 4 and 5 a research program initiated in \textit{M. Kashiwara} [Open problems in group representation theory, Proc. Taniguchi Symp. held in 1986, RIMS preprint 569, Kyoto Univ., 1987], is explained. In Lecture 6 the main technical tool, the characteristic cycle construction, is introduced. The primary objective of the lectures, the character formula and the proof of the Barbash-Vogan conjecture, are explained in Lectures 7 and 8, respectively. There is an Appendix, by M. Hunziker, on homological algebra. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0936.00032].