On Riemann-Roch Formulas for Multiplicities

Abstract

A Theorem due to Guillemin and Sternberg about geometric quantization of Hamiltonian actions of compact Lie groups $G$ on compact Kaehler manifolds says that the dimension of the $G$-invariant subspace is equal to the Riemann-Roch number of the symplectically reduced space. Combined with the shifting-trick, this gives explicit formulas for the multiplicities of the various irreducible components. One of the assumptions of the Theorem is that the reduction is regular, so that the reduced space is a smooth symplectic manifold. In this paper, we prove a generalization of this result to the case where the reduced space may have orbifold singularities. Our proof uses localization techniques from equivariant cohomology, and relies in particular on recent work of Jeffrey-Kirwan and Guillemin. Since there are no complex geometry arguments involved, the result also extends to non Kaehlerian settings.