On the collapsing of homogeneous bundles in arbitrary characteristic

Abstract

We study the geometry of equivariant, proper maps from homogeneous bundles $G{\times }_{P}V$ over flag varieties $G/P$ to representations of $G$, called collapsing maps. Kempf showed that, provided the bundle is completely reducible, the image $G\cdot V$ of a collapsing map has rational singularities in characteristic zero. We extend this result to positive characteristic and show that for the analogous bundles the saturation $G\cdot V$ is strongly $F$-regular if its coordinate ring has a good filtration. We further show that in this case the images of collapsing maps of homogeneous bundles restricted to Schubert varieties are $F$-rational in positive characteristic, and have rational singularities in characteristic zero. We provide results on the singularities and defining equations of saturations $G\cdot X$ for $P$-stable closed subvarieties $X\subset V$. We give criteria for the existence of good filtrations for the coordinate ring of $G\cdot X$. Our results give a uniform, characteristic-free approach for the study of the geometry of a number of important varieties: multicones over Schubert varieties, determinantal varieties in the space of matrices, symmetric matrices, skew-symmetric matrices, and certain matrix Schubert varieties therein, representation varieties of radical square zero algebras (e.g. varieties of complexes), subspace varieties, higher rank varieties, etc.

arXiv comment22 pages. Final version, to appear in Ann. Sci. Éc. Norm. Supér