Unipotent elements in small characteristic. (Q849849)

The author redoes the classification of unipotent conjugacy classes in a reductive connected algebraic group \(G\), in particular in small characteristic. He keeps the picture as close as possible to the picture in characteristic zero. One reason is that he wishes to establish purity for the \(\ell\)-adic cohomology spaces of the variety \(\mathcal B_u\) of Borel subgroups containing a unipotent element \(u\). This purity was known for good characteristic. The starting point for the classification is the Dynkin-Kostant classification of \(\text{SL}_2\) triples in characteristic zero. This classification can be formulated in terms of cocharacters and the Weyl group. In those terms it describes a partitioning of the unipotent variety into ``unipotent pieces'', in any characteristic. These pieces are conjugacy classes if the characteristic is good. In general a piece is a union of conjugacy classes. The author formulates eight properties of unipotent pieces and classes. In several cases a number of these properties are shown to hold and this is then applied to the purity question.