Tempered representations of p-adic groups: special idempotents and topology

Abstract

Let \(G=G(k)\) be a connected reductive group over a p-adic field k. The smooth (and tempered) complex representations of G can be considered as the nondegenerate modules over the Hecke algebra \({\mathcal {H}}={\mathcal {H}}(G)\) and the Schwartz algebra \({\mathcal {S}}={\mathcal {S}}(G)\) forming abelian categories \({\mathcal {M}}(G)\) and \({\mathcal {M}}^t(G)\), respectively. Idempotents \(e\in {\mathcal {H}}\) or \({\mathcal {S}}\) define full subcategories \({\mathcal {M}}_e(G)= \{V : {\mathcal {H}}eV=V\}\) and \({\mathcal {M}}_e^t(G)= \{V : {\mathcal {S}}eV=V\}\). Such an e is said to be special (in \({\mathcal {H}}\) or \({\mathcal {S}}\)) if the corresponding subcategory is abelian. Parallel to Bernstein’s result for \(e\in {\mathcal {H}}\) we will prove that, for special \(e \in {\mathcal {S}}\), \({\mathcal {M}}_e^t(G) = \prod _{\Theta \in \theta _e} {\mathcal {M}}^t(\Theta )\) is a finite direct product of component categories \({\mathcal {M}}^t(\Theta )\), now referring to connected components of the center of \({\mathcal {S}}\). A special \(e\in {\mathcal {H}}\) will be also special in \({\mathcal {S}}\), but idempotents \(e\in {\mathcal {H}}\) not being special can become special in \({\mathcal {S}}\). To obtain conditions we consider the sets \(\mathrm{Irr}^t(G) \subset \mathrm{Irr}(G)\) of (tempered) smooth irreducible representations of G, and we view \(\mathrm{Irr}(G)\) as a topological space for the Jacobson topology defined by the algebra \({\mathcal {H}}\). We use this topology to introduce a preorder on the connected components of \(\mathrm{Irr}^t(G)\). Then we prove that, for an idempotent \(e \in {\mathcal {H}}\) which becomes special in \({\mathcal {S}}\), its support \(\theta _e\) must be saturated with respect to that preorder. We further analyze the above decomposition of \({\mathcal {M}}_e^t(G)\) in the case where G is k-split with connected center and where \(e = e_J \in {\mathcal {H}}\) is the Iwahori idempotent. Here we can use work of Kazhdan and Lusztig to relate our preorder on the support \(\theta _{e_J}\) to the reverse of the natural partial order on the unipotent classes in G. We finish by explicitly computing the case \(G=GL_n\), where \(\theta _{e_J}\) identifies with the set of partitions of n. Surprisingly our preorder (which is a partial order now) is strictly coarser than the reverse of the dominance order on partitions.