Bott canonical basis?

Abstract

Expanding an idea of Raoul Bott, we propose a construction of canonical bases for unitary representations that comes from big torus actions on families of Bott-Samelson manifolds. The construction depends only on the choices of a maximal torus, a Borel subgroup ,and a reduced expression for the longest element of the Weyl group. It relies on a conjectural vanishing of higher cohomology of sheaves of holomorphic sections of certain line bundles on the total spaces of the families, hence the question mark in the title.

42 pages, 1 figure