Singularities of orthogonal and symplectic determinantal varieties

Abstract

Let either $GL(E)\times SO(F)$ or $GL(E)\times Sp(F)$ act naturally on the space of matrices $E\otimes F$. There are only finitely many orbits, and the orbit closures are orthogonal and symplectic generalizations of determinantal varieties, which can be described similarly using rank conditions. In this paper, we study the singularities of these varieties and describe their defining equations. We prove that in the symplectic case, the orbit closures are normal with good filtrations, and in characteristic $0$ have rational singularities. In the orthogonal case we show that most orbit closures will have the same properties, and determine precisely the exceptions to this.