Abstract:
A closed subgroup H of a connected reductive algebraic group G is said to be spherical if the homogeneous space G/H contains an open orbit for the induced action of a Borel subgroup B⊂G. According to a known result of Vinberg and Kimelfeld, H is spherical if and only if for every irreducible finite-dimensional representation V of G and every character χ of H the subspace of all H-semiinvariant vectors of weight χ in V is at most one-dimensional. All pairs (V,χ) for which the above-mentioned subspace is nontrivial (and hence precisely one-dimensional) are described by the so-called extended weight semigroup of G/H.
The talk is devoted to the problem of computing the extended weight semigroup for a given spherical subgroup H⊂G in terms of a regular embedding of H in a parabolic subgroup of G. The main result is an explicit procedure for computing generators of the semigroup in question provided that we know one more invariant of the spherical subgroup H, namely, the set of simple spherical roots. We also plan to discuss known results and open questions related to the problem of computing the simple spherical roots.