Weight polytopes and saturation of Demazure characters

Abstract

For $G$ a reductive group and $T\subset B$ a maximal torus and Borel subgroup, Demazure modules are certain $B$-submodules, indexed by elements of the Weyl group, of the finite irreducible representations of $G$. In order to describe the $T$-weight spaces that appear in a Demazure module, we study the convex hull of these weights - the Demazure polytope. We characterize these polytopes both by vertices and by inequalities, and we use these results to prove that Demazure characters are saturated, in the case that $G$ is simple of classical Lie type. Specializing to $G=GL_n$, we recover results of Fink, M\'esz\'aros, and St. Dizier, and separately Fan and Guo, on key polynomials, originally conjectured by Monical, Tokcan, and Yong.