Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Mathematics, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Flag varieties of reductive Lie groups and their subvarieties play a central role in representation theory. In the early 1980s, V. Deodhar introduced a decomposition of the flag variety which was then used to study the Kazdan-Lusztig polynomials. A Deodhar-type decomposition of the product of the flag variety with itself, referred to as the double flag variety, was introduced in 2007 by B. Webster and M. Yakimov, and each piece of the decomposition was shown to be coisotropic with respect to a naturally defined Poisson structure on the double flag variety. The work of Webster and Yakimov was partially motivated by the theory of cluster algebras in which Poisson structures play an important role. The Deodhar decomposition of the flag variety is better understood in terms of a cell decomposition of Bott-Samelson varieties, which are resolutions of Schubert varieties inside the flag variety. In the thesis, double Bott-Samelson varieties were introduced and cell decompositions of a Bott-Samelson variety were constructed using shuffles. When the sequences of simple reflections defining the double Bott-Samelson variety are reduced, the Deodhar-type decomposition on the double flag variety defined by Webster and Yakimov was recovered. A naturally defined Poisson structure on the double Bott-Samelson variety was also studied in the thesis, and each cell in the cell decomposition was shown to be coisotropic. For the cells that are Poisson, coordinates on the cells were also constructed and were shown to be log-canonical for the Poisson structure. / published_or_final_version / Mathematics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Schubert calculus has become an indispensable tool for enumerative geometry. It concerns the multiplication of Schubert classes in the cohomology of flag varieties, and is typically conducted using algebraic combinatorics by way of a polynomial ring presentation of the cohomology ring. The polynomials that represent the Schubert classes are called Schubert polynomials. An ongoing project in Schubert calculus has been to provide geometric foundations for the combinatorics. An example is the recovery by Knutson and Miller of the Schubert polynomials for finite flag varieties as the equivariant cohomology classes of matrix Schubert varieties. The present thesis is the start of a project to recover Schubert polynomials for the Borel-Moore homology of the (special linear) affine Grassmannian by an analogous process. This requires finitizing an affine Schubert variety to produce a matrix affine Schubert variety. This involves a choice of ``window'', so one must then identify a class representative that is independent of this choice. Examples lead us to conjecture that this representative is a k-Schur function. Concluding the discussion is a preliminary investigation into the combinatorics of Gröbner degenerations of matrix affine Schubert varieties, which should lead to a combinatorial proof of the conjecture. / Ph. D.

Bott-Samelson varieties associated to reductive algebraic groups are much studied in representation theory and algebraic geometry. They not only provide resolutions of singularities for Schubert varieties but also have interesting geometric properties of their own. A distinguished feature of Bott-Samelson varieties is that they admit natural affine coordinate charts, which allow explicit computations of geometric quantities in coordinates. Poisson geometry dates back to 19th century mechanics, and the more recent theory of quantum groups provides a large class of Poisson structures associated to reductive algebraic groups. A holomorphic Poisson structure Π on Bott-Samelson varieties associated to complex semisimple Lie groups, referred to as the standard Poisson structure on Bott-Samelson varieties in this thesis, was introduced and studied by J. H. Lu. In particular, it was shown by Lu that the Poisson structure Π was algebraic and gave rise to an iterated Poisson polynomial algebra associated to each affine chart of the Bott-Samelson variety. The formula by Lu, however, was in terms of certain holomorphic vector fields on the Bott-Samelson variety, and it is much desirable to have explicit formulas for these vector fields in coordinates. In this thesis, the holomorphic vector fields in Lu’s formula for the Poisson structure Π were computed explicitly in coordinates in every affine chart of the Bott-Samelson variety, resulting in an explicit formula for the Poisson structure Π in coordinates. The formula revealed the explicit relations between the Poisson structure and the root system and the structure constants of the underlying Lie algebra in any basis. Using a Chevalley basis, it was shown that the Poisson structure restricted to every affine chart of the Bott-Samelson variety was defined over the integers. Consequently, one obtained a large class of iterated Poisson polynomial algebras over any field, and in particular, over fields of positive characteristic. Concrete examples were given at the end of the thesis. / published_or_final_version / Mathematics / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis deals with the study of Schubert varieties, which are subsets of flag varieties indexed by elements of Weyl groups. We start by defining Lascoux elements in the Hecke algebra, and showing that they coincide with the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis elements in certain cases. We then construct a resolution (Zw, π) of the Schubert variety Xw for which Rπ*(C[l(w)]) is a sheaf on Xw whose expression in the Hecke algebra is closely related to the Lascoux element. We also define two new polynomials which coincide with the intersection cohomology Poincar\'e polynomial in certain cases. In the final chapter, we discuss some interesting combinatorial results concerning Bell and Catalan numbers which arose throughout the course of this work.

Let X be the affine flag manifold of Lie type A_n-1⁽¹⁾ where n ≥ 3 and let W_aff be the associated affine Weyl group. The moment graph for X encodes the torus fixed points (which are elements of the affine Weyl group W_aff and the torus stable curves in X. Given a fixed point u ∈ W_aff and a degree d = (d₀, d₁, ..., d_n−1) ∈ ℤ_≥0ⁿ, the combinatorial curve neighborhood is the set of maximal elements in the moment graph of X which can be reached from u′ ≤ u by a chain of curves of total degree ≤ d. In this thesis we give combinatorial formulas and algorithms for calculating these elements. / Doctor of Philosophy / The study of curves on flag manifolds is motivated by questions in enumerative geometry and physics. To a space of curves and incidence conditions one can associate a combinatorial object called the ‘combinatorial curve neighborhood’. For a fixed degree d and a (Schubert) cycle, the curve neighborhood consists of the set of all elements in the Weyl group which can be reached from the given cycle by a path of fixed degree in the moment graph of the flag manifold, and are also Bruhat maximal with respect to this property. For finite dimensional flag manifolds, a description of the curve neighborhoods helped answer questions related to the quantum cohomology and quantum K theory rings, and ultimately about enumerative geometry of the flag manifolds. In this thesis we study the situation of the affine flag manifolds, which are infinite dimensional. We obtain explicit combinatorial formulas and recursions which characterize the curve neighborhoods for flag manifolds of affine Lie type A. Among the conclusions, we mention that, unlike in the finite dimensional case, the curve neighborhoods have more than one component, although all components have the same length. In general, calculations reflect a close connection between the curve neighborhoods and the Lie combinatorics of the affine root system, especially the imaginary roots.

No description available.