Metaplectic Covers of Kac-Moody Groups and Whittaker Functions

Abstract

Starting from some linear algebraic data (a Weyl-group invariant bilinear form) and some arithmetic data (a bilinear Steinberg symbol), we construct a cover of a Kac-Moody group generalizing the work of Matsumoto. Specializing our construction over non-archimedean local fields, for each positive integer n we obtain the notion of $n$-fold metaplectic covers of Kac-Moody groups. In this setting, we prove a Casselman-Shalika type formula for Whittaker functions.