A Katsylo theorem for sheets of spherical conjugacy classes

Abstract

We show that, for a sheet or a Lusztig stratum S containing spherical conjugacy classes in a connected reductive algebraic group G over an algebraically closed field in good characteristic, the orbit space S/G is isomorphic to the quotient of an affine subvariety of G modulo the action of a finite abelian 2-group. The affine subvariety is a closed subset of a Bruhat double coset and the abelian group is a finite subgroup of a maximal torus of G. We show that sheets of spherical conjugacy classes in a simple group are always smooth and we list which strata containing spherical classes are smooth.