Commutativity of nilpotent cohomological Hall algebras of $\mathbf{A}^2$

Abstract

In this paper, we prove that both the seminilpotent and the fully nilpotent CoHAs of $\mathbf{A}^2$ are commutative. This is a surprising result in strong contrast with the CoHA of $\mathbf{A}^2$ without nilpotency conditions, previously studied by Davison, which is related to the Lie algebra $W_{1+\infty}$ of differential operators on $\mathbf{C}^*$. The latter is highly noncommutative. Our proof combines two constraints on the Lie bracket on the affinized BPS Lie algebra: it is filtered with respect to the perverse filtration and it is graded with respect to the cohomological degree. In the case of the Jordan quiver and nilpotent CoHAs, these constraints force the Lie bracket to vanish. We also describe the equivariant nilpotent CoHAs in the presence of the action of a one-dimensional torus rescaling the first coordinate of $\mathbf{A}^2$ with weight $1$ and the second with weight $-1$. In this case, one obtains enveloping algebras of Rees Lie algebras associated with the nilpotent and the seminilpotent filtrations on the Lie algebra $W_{1+\infty}^+$, reminiscent of the description of the equivariant non-nilpotent CoHA given by Davison.