Affine Gindikin-Karpelevich formula via Uhlenbeck spaces

Alexander Braverman, Michael Finkelberg, David Kazhdan

Published 2009-12-28, updated 2011-12-13Version 4

We prove a version of the Gindikin-Karpelevich formula for untwisted affine Kac-Moody groups over a local field of positive characteristic. The proof is geometric and it is based on the results of [1] about intersection cohomology of certain Uhlenbeck-type moduli spaces (in fact, our proof is conditioned upon the assumption that the results of [1] are valid in positive characteristic). In particular, we give a geometric explanation of certain combinatorial differences between finite-dimensional and affine case (observed earlier by Macdonald and Cherednik), which here manifest themselves by the fact that the affine Gindikin-Karpelevich formula has an additional term compared to the finite-dimensional case. Very roughy speaking, that additional term is related to the fact that the loop group of an affine Kac-Moody group (which roughly speaking should be thought of as some kind of "double loop group") does not behave well from algebro-geometric point of view; however it has a better behaved version which has something to do with algebraic surfaces. A uniform (i.e. valid for all local fields) and unconditional (but not geometric) proof of the affine Gindikin-Karpelevich formula is going to appear in [2].