Compactification of the isospectral varieties of nilpotent Toda lattices

Abstract

The paper concerns a compactification of the isospectral varieties of nilpotent Toda lattices for real split simple Lie algebras. The compactification is obtained by taking the closure of unipotent group orbits in the flag manifolds. The unipotent group orbits are called the Peterson varieties and can be used in the complex case to describe the quantum cohomology of Grassmannian manifolds. We construct a chain complex based on a cell decomposition consisting of the subsystems of Toda lattices. Explicit formulae for the incidence numbers of the chain complex are found, and encoded in a graph containing an edge whenever an incidence number is non-zero. We then compute rational cohomology, and show that there are just three different patterns in the calculation of Betti numbers. Although these compactified varieties are singular, they resemble certain smooth Schubert varieties e.g. they both have a cell decomposition consiting of unipotent group orbits of the same dimensions. In particular, for the case of a Lie algebra of type $A$ the rational homology/cohomology obtained from the compactified isospectral variety of the nilpotent Toda lattice equals that of the corresponding Schubert variety.