Character Sheaves and Depth-zero representations

The character formulas of Sally and Shalika are an early triumph in $p$-adic harmonic analysis, but, to date, the calculations underlying the formulas have not been available. In this paper, which should be viewed as a precursor of the forthcoming volume by the authors and Alan Roche, we leverage modern technology (for example, the Moy-Prasad theory) to compute explicit character tables. An interesting highlight is the computation of the 'exceptional' supercuspidal characters...

We propose a definition of characters in the context of Schneider-Teitelbaum's theory of locally analytic representations of p-adic reductive groups. This character will be a function on a compact subgroup of a maximal torus of the reductive group in question. As an example we treat the locally analytic principal series of SL(2,Q_p).

This paper is an introduction, in a simplified setting, to Lusztig's theory of character sheaves. It develops a notion of character sheaves on reductive Lie algebras which is more general then such notion of Lusztig, and closer to Lusztig's theory of character sheaves on groups. The development is self contained and independent of the characteristic $p$ of the ground field. The results for Lie algebras are then used to give simple and uniform proofs for some of Lusztig's resu...

Let $G$ be a connected reductive group over a field $F=\mathbb F_q((t))$ splitting over $\overline{\mathbb F}_q((t))$. Following [KV,DR], a tamely unramified Langlands parameter $\lambda:W_F\to{}^L G(\overline{\mathbb Q}_{\ell})$ in general position gives rise to a finite set $\Pi_{\lambda}$ of irreducible admissible representations of $G(F)$, called the $L$-packet. The main goal of this work is to provide a geometric description of characters $\chi_{\pi}$ of $\pi\in\Pi_{\l...

The purpose of this informal article is to introduce the reader to some of the objects and methods of the theory of p-adic representations. My hope is that students and mathematicians who are new to the subject will find it useful as a starting point. It consists mostly of an expanded version of the notes for my two lectures at the "Dwork trimester" in June 2001.

In 1979 Lusztig proposed a conjectural construction of supercuspidal representations of reductive p-adic groups, which is similar to the well known construction of Deligne and Lusztig in the setting of finite reductive groups. We present a general method for explicitly calculating the representations arising from Lusztig's construction and illustrate it with several examples. The techniques we develop also provide background for the author's joint work with Weinstein on a pur...

In this article we formulate and prove the main theorems of the theory of character sheaves on unipotent groups over an algebraically closed field of characteristic p>0. In particular, we show that every admissible pair for such a group G gives rise to an L-packet of character sheaves on G, and that, conversely, every L-packet of character sheaves on G arises from a (non-unique) admissible pair. In the appendices we discuss two abstract category theory patterns related to t...

We prove that regular supercuspidal representations of $p$-adic groups are uniquely determined by their character values on very regular elements -- a special class of regular semisimple elements on which character formulae are very simple -- provided that this locus is sufficiently large. As a consequence, we resolve a question of Kaletha by giving a description of Kaletha's $L$-packets of regular supercuspidal representations which mirrors Langlands' construction for real g...

I will survey some results in the theory of modular representations of a reductive $p$-adic group, in positive characteristic $\ell \neq p$ and $\ell=p$.

This article is based on lectures given by the authors in 2005 and 2006. Our first goal is to present an introduction to the orbit method with an emphasis on the character theory of finite nilpotent groups. The second goal (motivated by a recent work of G. Lusztig) is to explain several nontrivial aspects of character theory for finite groups of the form $G(F_{q^n})$, where $G$ is a unipotent algebraic group over a finite field $F_q$. In particular, we introduce the notion of...