Polishchuk's conjecture and Kazhdan-Laumon representations

TL;DR

This paper proves Polishchuk's conjecture in full generality, confirming that Kazhdan and Laumon's geometric construction of discrete series representations for finite groups of Lie type is well-defined.

Contribution

It establishes the conjecture for all types, ensuring the validity of Kazhdan and Laumon's construction of discrete series representations.

Findings

Polishchuk's conjecture is proven in full generality.

Kazhdan and Laumon's construction is confirmed to be well-defined.

Provides a new geometric approach to discrete series representations.

Abstract

In their 1988 paper "Gluing of perverse sheaves and discrete series representations," D. Kazhdan and G. Laumon constructed an abelian category $\mathcal{A}$ associated to a reductive group $G$ over a finite field with the aim of using it to construct discrete series representations of the finite Chevalley group $G(\mathbb{F}_q)$. The well-definedness of their construction depended on their conjecture that this category has finite cohomological dimension. This was disproven by R. Bezrukavnikov and A. Polishchuk in 2001, who found a counterexample in the case $G = SL_3$. In the same paper, Polishchuk then made an alternative conjecture: though this counterexample shows that the Grothendieck group $K_0(\mathcal{A})$ is not spanned by objects of finite projective dimension, he noted that a graded version of $K_0(\mathcal{A})$ can be thought of as a module over Laurent polynomials and conjectured that a certain localization of this module is generated by objects of finite projective dimension, and suggested that this conjecture could lead toward a proof that Kazhdan and Laumon's construction is well-defined. He proved this conjecture in Types $A_1, A_2, A_3$, and $B_2$. In the present paper, we prove Polishchuk's conjecture in full generality, and go on to prove that Kazhdan and Laumon's construction is indeed well-defined, giving a new geometric construction of discrete series representations of $G(\mathbb{F}_q)$.