We give an explicit description of the irreducible components of two-row Springer fibers for all classical types using cup diagrams. Cup diagrams can be used to label the irreducible components of two-row Springer fibers. Given a cup diagram, we explicitly write down all flags contained in the component associated to the cup diagram. This generalizes results by Stroppel--Webster and Fung to all classical types.
We give an explicit description of the irreducible components of two-row Springer fibers in type A as closed subvarieties in certain Nakajima quiver varieties in terms of quiver representations. By taking invariants under a variety automorphism, we obtain an explicit algebraic description of the irreducible components of two-row Springer fibers of classical type. As a consequence, we discover relations on isotropic flags that describe the irreducible components.
Kato introduced the exotic nilpotent cone to be a substitute for the ordinary nilpotent cone of type C with cleaner properties. Here we describe the irreducible components of exotic Springer fibres (the fibres of the resolution of the exotic nilpotent cone), and prove that they are naturally in bijection with standard bitableaux. As a result, we deduce the existence of an exotic Robinson-Schensted bijection, which is a variant of the type C Robinson-Schensted bijection between pairs of same-shape standard bitableaux and elements of the Weyl group; this bijection is described explicitly in the sequel to this paper. Note that this is in contrast with ordinary type C Springer fibres, where the parametrisation of irreducible components, and the resulting geometric Robinson-Schensted bijection, are more complicated. As an application, we explicitly describe the structure in the special cases where the irreducible components of the exotic Springer fibre have dimension 2, and show that in those cases one obtains Hirzebruch surfaces.
We define the notion of basic set data for finite groups (building on the notion of basic set, but including an order on the irreducible characters as part of the structure), and we prove that the Springer correspondence provides basic set data for Weyl groups. Then we use this to determine explicitly the modular Springer correspondence for classical types (defined over a base field of odd characteristic $p$, and with coefficients in a field of odd characteristic $ell eq p$): the modular case is obtained as a restriction of the ordinary case to a basic set. In order to do so, we compare the order on bipartitions introduced by Dipper and James with the order induced by the Springer correspondence. We also provide a quicker proof, by sorting characters according to the dimension of the corresponding Springer fiber, an invariant which is directly computable from symbols.
We study the exotic t-structure on the derived category of coherent sheaves on two-block Springer fibre (i.e. for a nilpotent matrix of type (m+n,n) in type A). The exotic t-structure has been defined by Bezrukavnikov and Mirkovic for Springer theoretic varieties in order to study representations of Lie algebras in positive characteristic. Using work of Cautis and Kamnitzer, we construct functors indexed by affine tangles, between categories of coherent sheaves on different two-block Springer fibres (i.e. for different values of n). After checking some exactness properties of these functors, we describe the irreducible objects in the heart of the exotic t-structure, and enumerate them by crossingless (m,m+2n) matchings. We compute the Exts between the irreducible objects, and show that the resulting algebras are an annular variant of Khovanovs arc algebras. In subsequent work we will make a link with annular Khovanov homology, and use these results to give a positive characteristic analogue of some categorification results using two-block parabolic category O (by Bernstein-Frenkel-Khovanov, Brundan, Stroppel, et al).
Katos exotic nilpotent cone was introduced as a substitute for the ordinary nilpotent cone of type C with cleaner properties. The geometric Robinson-Schensted correspondence is obtained by parametrizing the irreducible components of the Steinberg variety (the conormal variety for the action of a semisimple group on two copies of its flag variety); in type A the bijection coincides with the classical Robinson-Schensted algorithm for the symmetric group. Here we give a combinatorial description of the bijection obtained by using the exotic nilpotent cone instead of ordinary type C nilpotent cone in the geometric Robinson-Schensted correspondence; we refer this as the exotic Robinson-Schensted bijection. This is interesting from a combinatorial perspective, and not a naive extension of the type A Robinson-Schensted bijection.