A Construction of the Symmetric Monoidal Structure of the Geometric Whittaker Model

TL;DR

This paper constructs and verifies a symmetric monoidal structure on the bi-Whittaker category associated with a reductive algebraic group, extending previous work by providing an alternative construction and generalizing classical proofs.

Contribution

It offers a new construction of the symmetric monoidal structure on the bi-Whittaker category and proves its equivalence to the existing one, generalizing Gelfand's finite group proof to a geometric setting.

Findings

Established a new symmetric monoidal structure on the bi-Whittaker category.

Proved the new structure coincides with the existing one.

Generalized Gelfand's proof from finite groups to geometric categories.

Abstract

Let $G$ be a connected reductive algebraic group over an algebraically closed field $k$ of characteristic $p > 0$ and let $\ell$ be a prime number different from $p$. Let $U \subseteq G$ be a maximal unipotent subgroup, $T$ a maximal torus normalizing $U$ and $W$ the Weyl group of $G$. Let $\mathcal{L}$ be a non-degenerate multiplicative $\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_{\ell} $-local system on $U$. R. Bezrukavnikov and the second author have proved that the bi-Whittaker category, namely the triangulated monoidal category of $(U, \mathcal{L})$-biequivariant $\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_{\ell}$-complexes on $G$ is monoidally equivalent to an explicit thick triangulated monoidal subcategory $\mathscr{D}_{W}^{\circ}(T) \subseteq \mathscr{D}_{W}(T)$ of "central sheaves" on the torus. In particular it has the structure of a symmetric monoidal category coming from the symmetric monoidal structure on $\mathscr{D}_W(T)$. In this paper, we give another construction of a symmetric monoidal structure on the above category and prove that it agrees with the one coming from the above construction. For this, among other things, we generalize a proof by Gelfand for finite groups to the geometric setup.