Nilpotent orbits of height 2 and involutions in the affine Weyl group (Q783650)

The object of the authors is the study of the \(B\)-orbits of the set of spherical nilpotent elements \(\mathcal N_{sph}\) together with the associated partial order induced by the inclusion of orbits, where \(B\) is a Borel subgroup of an almost simple group \(G\) over an algebraically close field of charateristic zero. A nilpotent element \(e\) of the Lie algebra of \(G\) is in \(\mathcal N_{sph}\) if \(Ge\) is a spherical variety, or equivalently, if the height of \(e\) is less or equal three. The height of a nilpotent element \(e\) is defined as the maximum \(n\) such that \(\mathrm{ad}(e)^n\neq 0\). The main results of the paper involve a smaller subset of \(\mathcal N_{sph}\), the set \(\mathcal N_{2}\) of nilpotent elements with height less or equal two. The principal fact obtained in the paper is that \(\mathcal N_{2}\) is the union of B-orbits parametrized by subsets of pairwise strongly orthogonal simple roots arising in \(\mathcal N_{2}\). Unfortunately this is not the case for \(\mathcal N_{sph}\). Moreover, for a \(B\)-orbit \(Be_S\) in \(\mathcal N_{2}\), where \(e_S\) is a nilpotent element associated to a set of pairwise strongly orthogonal simple roots \(S\), the authors defines an involution \(\sigma_S\) of the affine Weyl group associated to the Lie algebra of \(G\) that establishes the inclusion relations of the \(B\)-orbits in the closure \(\overline{Be_S}\) and the dimensión of the \(B\)-orbit. That is, if \(R\) and \(S\) are two strongly orthogonal sets as above, \(Be_R \subset \overline{Be_S}\) if and only if \(\sigma_R \leq\sigma_S\) where \(``\leq"\) is the Bruhat order of the affine Weyl group. To prove the last result they use the action of \(B\) on some well known resolutions of singularities associated to the closure of a nilpotent \(G\)-orbit of \(\mathcal N_{2}\).