On generalized category $\mathcal {O}$ for a quiver variety

Abstract

In this paper, we give a method for relating the generalized category $\mathcal {O}$ defined by the author and collaborators to explicit finitely presented algebras, and apply this to quiver varieties. This allows us to describe combinatorially not just the structure of these category $\mathcal {O}$’s but also how certain interesting families of derived equivalences, the shuffling and twisting functors, act on them. In the case of Nakajima quiver varieties, the algebras that appear are weighted KLR algebras and their steadied quotients, defined by the author in earlier work. In particular, these give a geometric construction of canonical bases for simple representations, tensor products and Fock spaces. If the $\mathbb {C}^{*}$-action used to define the category $\mathcal {O}$ is a “tensor product action” in the sense of Nakajima, then we arrive at the unique categorifications of tensor products; in particular, we obtain a geometric description of the braid group actions used by the author in defining categorifications of Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants. Similarly, in affine type A, an arbitrary action results in the diagrammatic algebra equivalent to blocks of category $\mathcal {O}$ for cyclotomic Cherednik algebras. This approach also allows us to show that these categories are Koszul and understand their Koszul duals; in particular, we can show that categorifications of minuscule tensor products in types ADE are Koszul. In the affine case, this shows that our category $\mathcal {O}$’s are Koszul and their Koszul duals are given by category $\mathcal {O}$’s with rank-level dual dimension data, and that this duality switches shuffling and twisting functors.