Irregular and singular loci of commuting varieties

Geometric invariant theory (14L24) Group actions on varieties or schemes (quotients) (14L30) Special varieties (14M99) Group actions on affine varieties (14R20) Lie algebras of linear algebraic groups (17B45)

Abstract: We prove that the singular locus of the commuting variety of a noncommutative reductive Lie algebra is contained in the irregular locus and we compute the codimension of the latter. We prove that one of the irreducible components of the irregular locus has codimension 4. This yields the lower bound of the codimension of the singular locus, in particular, implies that it is at least 2. We also prove that the commuting variety is rational.

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Let \(\mathfrak g\) be a noncommutative reductive Lie algebra. The commuting variety \(\mathcal C=\mathcal C(\mathfrak g)\subset \mathfrak g\times \mathfrak g\) is defined as the set of pairs of commuting elements: \(\mathcal C=\{(x,y): [x,y]=0\}\). This paper is devoted to the study of the singularities of \(\mathcal C\). The author proves that the variety \(\mathcal C\) is always singular, and obtains a lower bound for the codimension of the singular locus \(\mathcal C^{\mathrm{sing}}\subset \mathcal C\). Namely, he shows that \(\mathrm{codim}_{\mathcal C}\mathcal C^{\mathrm{sing}}\geq 5-l\), where \(l=l(\mathfrak g)\) is the ``lacety of \(\mathfrak g\): i.e., \(l=1\) for \(\mathfrak g\) simply-laced, \(l=2\) for a non-simply laced algebra \(\mathfrak g\) not containing simple ideals of type \(\mathrm G_2\), and 3 otherwise. In particular, \(\mathrm{codim}_{\mathcal C}\mathcal C^{\mathrm{sing}}\) is always greater than or equal to 2, so this may be considered as an evidence in favor of the long-standing conjecture stating the normality of \(\mathcal C\). To prove this, the author considers the natural action of the adjoint group \(G\) of \(\mathfrak g\) on \(\mathcal C\) and defines the set \(\mathcal C^{\mathrm{irr}}\subset\mathcal C\) of irregular points as the set of points inside \(\mathcal C\) whose \(G\)-stabilizers for this action have the dimension greater than \(\mathrm{rk}\; G\), i.e. the dimension of the stabilizer for a generic point in \(\mathcal C\). Then he proves the inclusion \(\mathcal C^{\mathrm{sing}}\subset\mathcal C^{\mathrm{irr}}\) and estimates the dimension of \(\mathcal C^{\mathrm{irr}}\) by Lie-algebraic methods. Finally, he proves that the variety \(\mathcal C\) is always rational.

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