Boundedness of semistable principal bundles on a curve, with classical semisimple structure groups

Abstract

In characteristic zero, semistable principal bundles on a nonsingular projective curve with a semisimple structure group form a bounded family, as shown by Ramanathan in 1970's using the Narasimhan-Seshadri theorem. This was the first step in his construction of moduli for principal bundles. In this paper we prove boundedness in finite characteristics (other than characteristic 2), when the structure group is a semisimple, simply connected algebraic group of classical type. The main ingredient is an analogue of the Mukai-Sakai theorem (which says that any vector bundle admits a proper subbundle whose degree is `not too small') in the present situation.