Abelian Ideals and the Variety of Lagrangian Subalgebras

Sam Evens, Yu Li

Published 2020-10-09Version 1

For a semisimple algebraic group $G$ of adjoint type with Lie algebra $\mathfrak g$ over the complex numbers, we establish a bijection between the set of closed orbits of the group $G \ltimes \mathfrak g^{\ast}$ acting on the variety of Lagrangian subalgebras of $\mathfrak g \ltimes \mathfrak g^{\ast}$ and the set of abelian ideals of a fixed Borel subalgebra of $\mathfrak g$. In particular, the number of such orbits equals $2^{\text{rk} \mathfrak g}$ by Peterson's theorem on abelian ideals.