The geometry of tilting composition series via Richardson varieties

Abstract

We prove the (graded) Jordan--Hölder multiplicities of (mixed) tilting sheaves on flag varieties admit a geometric interpretation as the hypercohomology of certain sheaves on Richardson varieties in the Langlands dual flag variety. These sheaves are a motivic variant of geometric extensions, and may be described as a tensor product of parity sheaves on the Schubert and opposite Schubert varieties. We also provide an explicit formula for these multiplicities in terms of $\ell$-Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials.