A local-global principle for unipotent characters

Abstract

We obtain an adaptation of Dade's Conjecture and Sp\"ath's Character Triple Conjecture to unipotent characters of simple, simply connected finite reductive groups of type $\bf{A}$, $\bf{B}$ and $\bf{C}$. In particular, this gives a precise formula for counting the number of unipotent characters of each defect $d$ in any Brauer $\ell$-block $B$ in terms of local invariants associated to $e$-local structures. This provides a geometric version of the local-global principle in representation theory of finite groups. A key ingredient in our proof is the construction of certain parametrisations of unipotent generalised Harish-Chandra series that are compatible with isomorphisms of character triples.