Drinfeld, at the age of 20, discovered that the discrete series representations of the finite group
can be realized in the
-adic cohomology of the curve defined over
,
Deligne and Lusztig were inspired by this result to associate algebraic varieties to any finite group of Lie type and were extremely successful in using them to construct all representations of such a finite group. We will explain their beautiful ideas and supply concrete examples of Deligne-Lusztig curves. These curves themselves also enjoy extremal geometric and arithmetic properties, which, among others, lead us to contemplate on the answer to life, the universe and everything.
This is a note I prepared for my third Trivial Notions talk at Harvard, Fall 2013. Our main sources are [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
My talk consists of two parts. In the first part I shall define our trivial notion in the title. In second part I shall explain how this definition makes sense.
This completes the first part of my talk. Surprisingly we still have enough time to do the second part. Now let us start with a completely different story.
Finite groups of Lie typesAccording to the classification of finite simple groups, except 26 sporadic groups, all finite simple groups fit into three infinite series
(of prime order);
(
);A finite group of Lie type, as you can imagine, is a finite group analogue of Lie groups over real or complex numbers.
, where
is a prime power. It is the fixed points of the standard Frobenius endomorphism
by raising each entry to the
-th power, where
is an algebraic closure of
.
of an endomorphism
, where
is any reductive group over
and a certain power of
is a standard Frobenius
.
If you never care about algebraic varieties in positive characteristics, this probably serves as a reason that you probably should. After all these finite groups of Lie type form the major bulk of the building blocks of any finite group!
People familiar with Lie groups shall recall that the reductive groups over an algebraically closed field
are classified by certain combinatoric data called root data, which are, roughly speaking, instructions telling you how to glue the building blocks
(and tori) to obtain
. These fit into 4 infinite series
,
,
,
and five exceptional ones
,
,
,
,
according to the associated Dynkin diagram (please refer to the picture on the wall outside 507 if you have good eyesight). For example,
consists of the general linear group
and its variations
,
, and so on.
. For
, we obtain
and
is the (unique) unitary group over
(
). It is usually denoted by
. The endomorphism
induces the involution of the Dynkin diagram
.
In general, such a endomorphism
induces an automorphism of the Dynkin diagram with arrow disregarded. Besides the
-points of the split groups (a.k.a., Chevalley groups), we have new series of finite groups of Lie type:
,
,
,
. These are
-points of the quasi-split forms of
,
,
,
, known as Steinberg groups;
: Suzuki groups, exist only when
;
: Ree groups of type
, exist only when
;
: Ree groups of type
, exist only when
.For the last three groups, the involution on the Dynkin diagram does not preserve the length of the roots and they are not
-points of any reductive groups! (You may want to think of them as points of a reductive group defined over a field of
or
elements, which of course does not make sense).
Now I have described the classification of finite groups of Lie type. You may find it interesting or simply don't care. But it will certainly become more interesting when a finite group
acts on objects that you care more about, e.g., topological spaces, manifolds, algebraic varieties... Linearizing such an action gives rise to a linear representation of
. So how can we understand all the irreducible representations of
when
is a finite group of Lie type? Let us consider the simplest (but already rich enough) example
.
Representations of 
Over the complex numbers, the representation theory of any finite group
is rather clean: any finite dimensional representation of
decomposes as a direct sum of irreducible subrepresentations. A representation
is characterized by its character
.
is irreducible if and only if
. The number of irreducible representations of
is the same as the number of conjugacy classes of
. And so on.
The conjugacy classes of
can be classified using elementary methods. For simplicity we shall assume that
is odd. The representatives can be chosen as

Notice
acts on
and produces a nonsplit torus
. Restricting to the norm one elements, we obtain
, a nonsplit torus of order
. Over
, its elements are conjugate to elements of the form
.
So in total we have
conjugacy classes. How do we construct
irreducible representations of
? One usual way to build the character table of any finite group
is to try to induce known representations of subgroups of
. A nice subgroup is given by the split diagonal torus
, which is a cyclic group of order
. The irreducible representations of
are simply the
characters
. But
itself is too small which makes
huge and far from irreducible. Instead we can view
as a character on the Borel subgroup
(trivial on the unipotent subgroup
). The resulting representation produced this way is called a parabolic induction.
,
is irreducible of dimension
(principal series representations).
but
,
is a direct sum of two irreducible representations of dimension
(half principal series representations).
,
is a direct sum of the trivial representation and an irreducible representation of dimension
(the Steinberg representation).This gives us
irreducible representations and there are
(about half) left to be discovered. It turns out
of them has dimension
(discrete series representations) and 2 of them has dimension
(half discrete series representations). Looking at the number
, one is tempted to induce a character of
to construct the rest, but since there is no Borel subgroup containing it, there is no parabolic induction and the naive induction is more complicated than our expectation. Of course, one can mess around the character table and construct the discrete series representations using brutal force; but life would be harder for groups other than
.
The Drinfeld curveIf you are Drinfeld, then at this stage you must have realized that the right thing to look at is the affine curve
defined by the equation
What is nice about it? First of all, the group
acts on it by
. More interestingly, it admits the action of
given by the linear transformation
Indeed,
by characteristic
miracle and so fixes the determinant
! These two actions commute with each other and produce a large group of automorphisms of
.
of the curve
has genus
. But
(indeed, a large group of order
acts on
) grows much quickly than
! So when
is large,
is an example of curves in positive characteristic violating the Hurwitz bound
for curves
with
in characteristic 0. So the answer to life, the universe and everything may be something different if the universe has positive characteristic.
Let
be
-adic etale cohomology groups with compact support of
. Then the group
naturally acts on
.
be a character. We define the Deligne-Lusztig induction of
to be
, a virtual character of
. Here
denotes the
-isotypic component of
.
So we successfully "induce" a character of
to obtain a (virtual) character of
. It behaves much nicer than the naive induction from
to
.
. Notice
gives an isomorphism
. So we have
by excision.
and
for
. So
as a
-representation.
is simply a finite set of points, so
and
acts on it by permutation. This permutation action is the same as the left action of
on
, hence
, which is exactly
! In particular,
has degree
.
, then a fixed point formula of Deligne-Lusztig shows that
, whcih is zero since
. Therefore the trace of any element
on
is zero if
, hence as a
-virtual representation,
is a multiple of the regular representation
. In particular, every
-isotypic component the same degree, which is
for
. Therefore
is a degree
representation of
. It turns out to be irreducible when
and is a direct sum of two representations of dimension
when
. These are exactly the discrete series representations of
!
The discrete series representations have been realized in the cohomology of
. Contemplating on this beautiful example, the following geometric picture emerges: the group
acts on
"horizontally" and
acts on
"vertically" by permuting the points in the fiber of
. One should really think of
as the flag variety of
and
is a finite covering with the covering group the nonsplit torus
.
Deligne-Lusztig varietiesWe come back to the general consideration of finite groups of Lie type
. Deligne and Lusztig generalized Drinfeld's construction to associate varieties to any such
.
Let
be a
-stable maximal torus and
be a
-stable Borel containing
(their existence is ensured by Lang's theorem). Let
be the Weyl group. All Borel subgroups of
are conjugate: so the conjugate action of
on the set of Borel subgroups of
is transitive and the stabilizer the action of on
is simply
itself. Therefore we have a bijection
Now the Bruhat decomposition
tells us that
We say the two Borel subgroups
and
are in relative position
, where
is the image of
in
. The nice thing is that
itself is a projective variety over
. We cut out a locally closed subvariety
(Deligne-Lusztig variety) consisting of Borel subgroups
such that
and
that are in relative position
. In other words,
It is a smooth quasi-projective (indeed, quasi-affine, and conjecturally, affine) variety of dimension
. This gives a stratification
Notice the left action of
doesn't change the relative position, hence
acts on each
from the left, which is what we want.
Let
be the unipotent radical of
. Then
is a
-torsor:
normalizes
and acts on
from the right. We define similarly a locally closed subvariety
Then
is indeed a
-torsor, where
. Now we can play the same game by "inducing" a character
of the torus
to obtain a virtual character
of
using the cohomology
of the Deligne-Lusztig variety
.
. Then the diagonal torus
and the standard Borel are
-stable. The Weyl group
, with the nontrivial element
represented by
and maps the standard Borel to the opposite Borel, the subgroup of lower triangular matrices. The elements of
can be identified as complete flags
, in other words, points in
. Two flags are in relative position
if and only if
, in other words, two points in
are in relative position
if and only they are distinct. In particular
, and
. An element in
is nothing but a complete flag together with two vectors
and
such that
. Two marked flags are in relative position
if and only if
. Therefore
consists of marked flags such that
, i.e.,
. Writing
, this gives exactly
and recovers Drinfeld's ingenious construction. In this case
is exactly the nonsplit torus
.
and
a permuatation of length
. One similarly obtains that
and
is given by the equation
.
,
is a covering map between zero-dimensional varieties. Then
is simply the usual parabolic induction of a character
of
.
By carefully studying the geometry of the varieties
and
. Deligne-Lusztig proved:
appears in
for some
and
. Moreover,
. In particular, when
is in general position, i.e., no nontrivial elements of
fixes
, one of
is an irreducible representation of
.
, the nontrivial element
acts by
. The above theorem coincides with the fact that
(discrete series) and
(principle series) is irreducible whenever
.
To complete the construction of all irreducible representations of any finite group of Lie type, it "suffices" to decompose each
when
is not in general position. This task is far from trivial but was eventually done by Lusztig in 80's in a series of papers and books.
Deligne-Lusztig curvesFinally, let us consider the special case when dimension of
is one-dimensional. This corresponds to the case
is a simple reflection. The relevant groups are groups of
-rank 1. There are only four such groups:
,
,
,
. Let
, then
is a smooth projective curve over
. One can compute the Euler characteristic of
(hence the genus) and the number of rational points of
(=
) from the finite group data using the fixed point formula. We gather the results here (c.f., [7]).
:
.
: The Fermat curve
of degree
. It has genus
and
-points.
: The Deligne-Lusztig curve of Suzuki type (DLS). It has genus
and
-points.
: The Deligne-Lusztig curve of Ree type (DLR). It has genus
and
-points.Now there comes no surprise that these curves admits a large number of automorphisms. A theorem of Stichtenoth asserts that
except
is Fermat curve
. A theorem of Henn shows that
except the Fermat curve
, the DLS, the hyperelliptic curve
(
) and the curve
(
,
). Amazingly enough you can go home and check by hand that the Deligne-Lusztig curves
, DLS, DLR are all maximal curves: they all achieve the Hasse-Weil bound
for the number of
-rational points!
[1]Representations of reductive groups over finite fields, Ann. of Math. (2) 103 (1976), no.1, 103--161.
[2]Finite groups of Lie type, John Wiley \& Sons Inc., New York, 1985.
[3]Representations of finite groups of Lie type, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
[4]Representations of $\rm SL_2(\Bbb F_q)$, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., London, 2011.
[5]Modular representations of finite groups of Lie type, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.
[6]A note on superspecial and maximal curves, Bull. Iranian Math. Soc 39 (2013), 405-413.
[7]Deligne-Lusztig varieties and group codes, Coding theory and algebraic geometry (Luminy, 1991), Lecture Notes in Math., 1518 Springer, 1992, 63--81.