Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-1-2011

Publication Title

Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society

Abstract

Springer varieties are studied because their cohomology carries a natural action of the symmetric group Sn and their top-dimensional cohomology is irreducible. In his work on tangle invariants, Khovanov constructed a family of Springer varieties Xn as subvarieties of the product of spheres (S2)n. We show that if Xn is embedded antipodally in (S2)n then the natural Sn-action on (S2)n induces an Sn-representation on the image of H*(Xn). This representation is the Springer representation. Our construction admits an elementary (and geometrically natural) combinatorial description, which we use to prove that the Springer representation on H*(Xn) is irreducible in each degree. We explicitly identify the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis for the irreducible representation of Sn corresponding to the partition (n/2, n/2).

Volume

151

Issue

1

First Page

59

Last Page

81

DOI

10.1017/S0305004111000132

ISSN

03050041

Comments

Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.

Included in

Mathematics Commons

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