Homological duality for covering groups of reductive $p$-adic groups

Abstract

In this largely expository paper we extend properties of the homological duality functor $RHom_{\mathcal H}(-,{\mathcal H})$ where ${\mathcal H}$ is the Hecke algebra of a reductive $p$-adic group, to the case where it is the Hecke algebra of a finite central extension of a reductive $p$-adic group. The most important properties being that $RHom_{\mathcal H}(-,{\mathcal H})$ is concentrated in a single degree for irreducible representations and that it gives rise to Schneider--Stuhler duality for Ext groups (a Serre functor like property). Along the way we also study Grothendieck--Serre duality with respect to the Bernstein center and provide a proof of the folklore result that on admissible modules this functor is nothing but the contragredient duality. We single out a necessary and sufficient condition for when these three dualities agree on finite length modules in a given block. In particular, we show this is the case for all cuspidal blocks as well as, due to a result of Roche, on all blocks with trivial stabilizer in the relative Weyl group.