The Lafforgue variety and irreducibility of induced representations

Abstract

We construct the Lafforgue variety, an affine scheme equipped with an open dense subscheme parametrizing the simple modules of a non-commutative unital algebra $R$ over any field $k$, provided that the center $Z(R)$ is finitely generated and $R$ is finitely generated as a $Z(R)$-module. Our main technical tool is a generalization of the Hilbert scheme for non-commutative algebras, which may be of independent interest. Applying our construction in the case of Hecke algebras of Bernstein components, we derive a characterization for the irreducibility of induced representations in terms of the vanishing of a generalized discriminant on the Bernstein variety. We explicitly compute the discriminant in the case of an Iwahori-Hecke algebra of a split reductive $p$-adic group.