Equivariant sheaves for classical groups acting on Grassmannians

Abstract Let V be a finite-dimensional complex vector space. Assume that V is a direct sum of subspaces each of which is equipped with a nondegenerate symmetric or skew-symmetric bilinear form. In this article, we introduce a stratification of the Grassmannian $\text {Gr}_k(V)$ related to the action of the appropriate product of orthogonal and symplectic groups, and we study the topology of this stratification. The main results involve sheaves with coefficients in a field of characteristic other than $2$ . We prove that there are “enough” parity sheaves, and that the hypercohomology of each parity sheaf also satisfies a parity-vanishing property. This situation arises in the following context: let x be a nilpotent element in the Lie algebra of either $G = \text {Sp}_N(\mathbb {C})$ or $G = \text {SO}_N(\mathbb {C})$ , and let $V = \ker x \subset \mathbb {C}^N$ . Our stratification of $\text {Gr}_k(V)$ is preserved by the centralizer $G^x$ , and we expect our results to have applications in Springer theory for classical groups.