Intersection pairings in the N-fold reduced product of adjoint orbits
Lisa Jeffrey, Jia Ji

TL;DR
This paper extends previous work by calculating intersection pairings in the symplectic reduced space formed by N adjoint orbits of a compact Lie group, providing new insights into its geometric structure.
Contribution
It introduces a method to compute intersection pairings in the N-fold reduced product of adjoint orbits, advancing understanding of their symplectic geometry.
Findings
Derived explicit formulas for intersection pairings
Connected intersection pairings to symplectic volume computations
Enhanced understanding of the geometric structure of adjoint orbit products
Abstract
In previous work we computed the symplectic volume of the symplectic reduced space of the product of N adjoint orbits of a compact Lie group. In this paper we compute the intersection pairings of the same object.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Intersection Pairings in the -fold Reduced Product of Adjoint Orbits
Lisa C. Jeffrey
Department of Mathematics
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
[email protected] http://www.math.toronto.edu/~jeffrey and
Jia Ji
Department of Mathematics
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
Abstract.
In previous work we computed the symplectic volume of the symplectic reduced space of the product of adjoint orbits of a compact Lie group. In this paper we compute the intersection pairings in the same object.
Key words and phrases:
reduced product, adjoint orbit, symplectic reduction
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification:
Primary: 53D20; Secondary: 53D05
The first author is partially supported by an NSERC Discovery Grants. The authors wish to thank Rebecca Goldin and Augustin-Liviu Mare for helpful conversations.
Contents
1. Introduction
Let be a compact connected Lie group with maximal torus . As a vector space, the equivariant cohomology of a Hamiltonian -space is isomorphic to the tensor product of the ordinary cohomology of and the -equivariant cohomology of a point. Here is the polynomial ring on the Lie algebra of the maximal torus , which is denoted . This result comes from [20] (Proposition 5.8). The above isomorphism is only an isomorphism of vector spaces, not of rings.
When and are as above, there is a surjective ring homomorphism (the Kirwan map) from the equivariant cohomology of to the ordinary cohomology of the symplectic reduced space or symplectic quotient , which is defined as
[TABLE]
where is the moment map. The ordinary cohomology of the reduced space is the quotient of the equivariant cohomology of by the kernel of .
Provided the reduced space is a smooth manifold, it satisfies Poincaré duality, so its cohomology ring is determined by the intersection pairings (in other words the evaluation of cohomology classes against the fundamental class).
Let be the product of a collection of adjoint orbits of . In this situation, the above isomorphism is an isomorphism of -modules. We give a formula for the intersection pairings in using the same methods as in our earlier paper [15], in other words the localization theorem of Atiyah-Bott and Berline-Vergne and the residue formula of [16] (Theorem 8.1).
2. Notation and Conventions
Let be a compact connected Lie group. Let be the Lie algebra of . Let be the dual vector space of .
We choose a maximal torus in . Let be the Lie algebra of . Let be the dual vector space of . Let be the corresponding Weyl group.
Let be the adjoint representation of . Let be the coadjoint representation of . More explicitly,
[TABLE]
for all , , , where is the natural pairing between a covector and a vector.
Remark*.*
Note that for all , and . That is, both and are left actions.
Let be the adjoint representation of . Let denote the coadjoint representation of the Lie algebra . Thus, .
Remark*.*
Note that both and are Lie algebra homomorphisms.
For convenience we work with orbits of the adjoint action rather than the coadjoint action, so our orbits are subsets of instead of . The invariant inner product on (invariant under the adjoint action) gives a -equivariant isomorphism between (equipped with the adjoint action) and (with the coadjoint action).
Let denote the adjoint orbit through . The following theorem is well known.
Theorem 1** (Kirillov-Kostant-Souriau).**
[19]** Given any , the adjoint orbit is a smooth compact connected submanifold in and there exists a natural -invariant (under the adjoint action) symplectic structure on . In other words, there exists a closed non-degenerate -invariant real -form on . More explicitly, can be constructed in the following way.
For all , let be the antisymmetric bilinear form on defined by
[TABLE]
for all . Then can be defined by
[TABLE]
for all , .
Note that for all , .
This natural -form is sometimes referred to as the Kirillov-Kostant-Souriau symplectic form on the adjoint orbit .
Therefore, an adjoint orbit becomes a symplectic manifold when it is equipped with its Kirillov-Kostant-Souriau symplectic form . In addition, we have the following:
Proposition 2**.**
The adjoint action of on is a Hamiltonian -action with the moment map given by the inclusion map . In other words, is equivariant with respect to the adjoint action of on and the adjoint action of on , and for all ,
[TABLE]
where is defined by for all and is the vector field on such that for all , the tangent vector is
[TABLE]
Let be adjoint orbits. Then we can form their Cartesian product:
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
We assume the following:
Assumption 3**.**
All of are diffeomorphic to the homogeneous space . This assumption is equivalent to the assumption that all of the stabilizer groups are conjugate to the chosen maximal torus . If all of are contained in , then this assumption is saying that
[TABLE]
Remark*.*
Since every adjoint orbit can be written as for some , we will always assume that satisfies that for all .
The Cartesian product carries a natural symplectic structure defined by:
[TABLE]
where is the projection onto the -th component.
Let act on by the diagonal action :
[TABLE]
for all , .
We mentioned above that the symplectic form is invariant under this action of . We also have the following:
Proposition 4**.**
The diagonal action of on is a Hamiltonian -action with the moment map being:
[TABLE]
for all .
We assume that:
Assumption 5**.**
is a regular value for and .
Remark*.*
By Sard’s theorem, the set
[TABLE]
has nonempty interior in .
Then, the level set
[TABLE]
is a closed, thus compact, submanifold of and the diagonal action of restricts to an action on . Therefore, we can form the quotient space (or symplectic reduction) with respect to this action of on :
[TABLE]
The quotient space is also compact.
If the -action on is free and proper (in our situation, properness is automatically satisfied), then the quotient space is a smooth manifold. However, in our situation, the -action on is in general not free. Hence in general it follows from the treatment in [12] that the quotient space is an orbifold [13] rather than a smooth manifold. To avoid this complication, we will make the following assumption.
Assumption 6**.**
The quotient space is a smooth compact manifold.
Assumption 6 is satisfied provided the stabilizer of the action of at all points in is the identity.
Remark*.*
The above assumption will put further restrictions on which we can choose as initial data. Thus we only choose initial data from the following set:
[TABLE]
Notice that since the elements in the center of always act trivially on and , Assumption 6 is valid if acts freely on . This happens for if all the coadjoint orbits are generic.
Then, we have the following well known theorem:
Theorem 7** (Marsden-Weinstein).**
The smooth compact manifold
[TABLE]
carries a unique symplectic structure such that
[TABLE]
where is the inclusion map and is the associated projection map.
Definition 8**.**
We call this compact symplectic manifold
[TABLE]
an -fold reduced product.
Remark*.*
The dimension of an -fold reduced product is
[TABLE]
when all orbits are generic. In the case and , this is . These reduced products are diffeomorphic to the 2-sphere [18].
Remark*.*
If the initial point is clear from the context, we will suppress the inclusion of the point in our notations and write, for example, instead of , respectively. Similarly, this is done for the notations of the symplectic structures and so on.
3. Intersection pairings of -fold reduced products
3.1. Introduction
In our previous paper [15], we investigated the symplectic volume of -fold reduced products and derived the following formula for all generic -fold reduced products:
Theorem 9**.**
In the notation introdued earlier, and under the hypotheses imposed in the previous section, we have
[TABLE]
where is the moment map for the -action on , is generic, and
[TABLE]
where runs over all the positive roots of .
3.2. Equivariant cohomology and the Cartan model
The main tool we used to prove Theorem 9 is the Atiyah-Bott-Berline-Vergne localization formula. (See [16].) We make use of the Cartan model for equivariant cohomology (see for example [24]). In this model, an equivariant differential form is represented by a linear combination of differential forms with polynomial dependence on a parameter
[TABLE]
We assume has degree in . The grading is the sum of the differential form grading and two times the degree as a polynomial in . The differential is
[TABLE]
where denotes interior product. Recall that is the fundamental vector field generated by the action of . For example, the extension of the symplectic form to an equivariantly closed form is
[TABLE]
where is the moment map associated to (in other words the function whose Hamiltonian vector field is ).
An equivariant -form in the Cartan model is a sum of terms for , where the degree of as a differential form is . If the differential form degree is [math], then where is the (real) dimension of the manifold.
The restriction of to a fixed point of the action is (the term of degree [math] as a differential form). If the form is equivariantly closed, it follows that
[TABLE]
for all .
Let be a Hamiltonian -manifold. The Kirwan map, which we shall denote by , is a map from to , where is defined as the zero level set of the moment map on . It is the restriction map to a level set of the moment map. If [math] is a regular value of the moment map, then . When [math] is a regular value of the moment map, Kirwan proved that the map is surjective [20].
3.3. Cohomology of orbits
For an adjoint orbit homeomorphic to , we see (for example from [9], Chap. 10.2 Proposition 3) that the cohomology is generated multiplicatively by the first Chern classes of line bundles over the orbit, where
[TABLE]
where we write the orbit as and the equivalence relation is
[TABLE]
for , , and for a weight For example, for , the collection of comprising the simple roots of gives rise to a basis for the cohomology of . For , a proof of this result can be found in Fulton’s book [9] (Chapter 10.2, Proposition 3). For general Lie groups this is Theorem 5 in Section 4 in the article by Tu [26].
We can write each weight as
[TABLE]
for a linear map which sends the integer lattice (the kernel of the exponential map) to . Here we have used the exponential map . The equivariant first Chern class of the line bundle is denoted
[TABLE]
Its restriction to an isolated fixed point is
[TABLE]
The restriction of this equivariant first Chern class to a component of the fixed point set is . By naturality, we have that
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
is projection on the -th orbit, and is a line bundle over .
3.4. Localization
The Atiyah-Bott-Berline-Vergne localization formula leads to the following (see [16], Theorem 8.1):
[TABLE]
In the case when is the product of adjoint orbits when
[TABLE]
is the equivariant extension of the symplectic volume form, and
[TABLE]
is the symplectic volume form on . Theorem 9 may be expressed as follows.
[TABLE]
Equation (20) is the meaning of the integral over in equation (16) whose definition is given in [11] and elaborated in [16]. The symbol (the residue) is defined in [16], Theorem 8.1. See also [17], Proposition 3.2. The residue has several equivalent definitions (as outlined in [17]). One of these definitions characterizes the residue as an iteration of one-variable residues.
Remark*.*
One feature that is special to our situation (Cartesian products of adjoint orbits) is that all the equivariant Euler classes are the same, except for the sign (which is , the product of the signatures of the permutations). Up to sign, the equivariant Euler class is a power of where is the product of positive roots.
In the above notation, we have the following generalization of Theorem 9:
Theorem 10**.**
Let be as above, and let be a -equivariant cohomology class on . Let be the Kirwan map. We have
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
Here is a product of powers of a collection of equivariant first Chern classes where the index runs from to if we are considering the reduced space of the product of orbits and is a nonnegative integer, and the weight of the -th line bundle is with associated linear map . The restriction of to the fixed point set of the action is
[TABLE]
Remark*.*
Theorem 10 describes all intersection pairings between cohomology classes of .
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
- 1[1] M. F. Atiyah and R. Bott: The Moment Map and Equivariant Cohomology, Topology 23 (1984), 1–28.
- 2[2] M. Audin: Torus Actions on Symplectic Manifolds , Second revised edition, Progress in Mathematics, Volume 93 , 2004, Springer Basel AG.
- 3[3] N. Berline, E. Getzler and M. Vergne: Heat Kernels and Dirac Operators , Grundlehren, Springer-Verlag (2004)
- 4[4] N. Berline and M. Vergne: Classes caractéristiques équivariantes. Formules de localisation en cohomologie équivariante, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 295 (1982), 539–541.
- 5[5] N. Berline and M. Vergne: Zéros d’un champ de vecteurs et classes caractéristiques équivariantes, Duke Math. J. 50 (1983), 539–549.
- 6[6] T. Bröcker and T. tom Dieck: Representations of Compact Lie Groups , Graduate Texts in Mathematics 98 , 1985, Springer.
- 7[7] A. Cannas da Silva: Lectures on Symplectic Geometry , Corrected 2nd printing, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1764 , 2008, Springer.
- 8[8] J. J. Duistermaat and G. J. Heckman: On the Variation in the Cohomology of the Symplectic Form of the Reduced Phase Space, Invent. Math. 69 , 259–268 (1982)
