Modular representations of simple Lie algebras

DOI10.1090/S0273-0979-98-00749-6MaRDI QIDQ4211168zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 10 September 1998

Published in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1090/s0273-0979-98-00749-6

\(p\)-character block coadjoint orbit comprehensive survey modular representations nilpotent variety quantum group at a root of unity regular nilpotent orbit simple Lie algebras standard Levi form subregular nilpotent orbit Weyl group

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Simple, semisimple, reductive (super)algebras (17B20) Quantum groups (quantized enveloping algebras) and related deformations (17B37) Modular Lie (super)algebras (17B50) Homological methods in Lie (super)algebras (17B55) Representation theory for linear algebraic groups (20G05)

Review text

In this paper the author gives a comprehensive survey of known results and open questions on irreducible representations of Lie algebras arising from a simple algebraic group over an algebraically closed ground field of prime characteristic \(p\). The paper starts with a short overview of the necessary group-theoretic and representation-theoretic background. After a brief description of the situation in the restricted case, the author concentrates on non-restricted representations. Here one of the high lights has been Premet's recent proof of the Kac-Weisfeiler conjecture which gives a lower bound on the \(p\)-powers dividing the dimension of every simple module. But in general it is not known whether a (necessarily simple) module of this minimal dimension always exists and how it can be constructed explicitly. After a short section on support and rank varieties including Premet's recent description involving centralizers, the author gives detailed information on baby Verma modules. The main obstacle in contrast to the restricted case is that for some choices of a Borel subalgebra the corresponding baby Verma modules do not have a unique maximal submodule and even can be decomposable as examples of Jantzen show. Nevertheless, the author conjectures that the number of isomorphism classes of simple representations for a fixed non-zero \(p\)-character does not exceed the number of isomorphism classes of restricted simple representations. If the \(p\)-character is semisimple, then the representation theory of the corresponding reduced universal enveloping algebra is well-known. Otherwise, Jordan decomposition allows a reduction to the case where the \(p\)-character is nilpotent. The techniques developed so far are mainly applicable if the \(p\) character has so-called standard Levi form with respect to a Borel subalgebra. Then every baby Verma module has a unique maximal submodule and the simple modules can be classified by ``highest weights. Moreover, the blocks of the reduced universal enveloping algebra are in one-to-one correspondence with the blocks of the restricted universal enveloping algebra. The author conjectures that this last result is valid for an arbitrary nilpotent \(p\)-character. Besides these general results there is the completely understood case of regular nilpotent \(p\)-characters and Jantzen's recent calculations for subregular nilpotent \(p\)-characters when the Lie algebra is of type \(A\) or \(B\). The latter seem to correspond to Lusztig's purely combinatorial computations of the composition factor multiplicities of baby Verma modules. The author also suggests a natural candidate for a geometric study of representations with non-zero \(p\)-character \(\chi\), namely the collection \({\mathcal B}_x\) of all Borel subalgebras which contain the element \(x\) corresponding to \(\chi\). If the geometrically constructed ``standard modules could be systematically related to the baby Verma modules, then this may help to understand the variation of their properties depending on the choice of the Borel subalgebra. It is suspected that choosing the Borel subalgebra to lie on a single irreducible component of \({\mathcal B}_x\) will only yield \(\chi\)-reduced baby Verma modules with a unique maximal submodule. Finally, it is noted that many of the discussed topics have an analogue for quantum groups at a root of unity and relevant references are given.

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