Séance Séminaire

Séminaire Algèbre Géométrie Algébrique Topologie Algébrique

Enumerating defect zero blocks of finite classical groups and Spetses

A staircase partition cannot be tiled in such a way that upon removing a domino-shaped tile from the staircase, you still have a partition. We say that the staircase partition is a 2-core partition. The notion of an e-core partition is similar, but with e-ribbons in place of dominoes. The e-core partitions describe blocks in the representation theory of symmetric groups in positive characteristic, but also rational Cherednik algebras and Hecke algebras at roots of unity. In the modular representation theory of the finite general linear group, the e-core partitions describe the unipotent blocks. In 1996, Granville and Ono proved that there exists an e-core partition of every size n if e is at least 4 (when e is 2 or 3, there are infinitely many values of n without an e-core partition of size n). We may restate Granville and Ono's result as saying that in quantum characteristic at least 4, there exists a defect 0 unipotent block of GL(n,q) for every natural number n. We may then ask if there is an analogue of this theorem for other finite classical groups, for cyclotomic Hecke algebras at appropriate parameters, etc. This a joint project with Thomas Gerber.