Math Seminars.

Dennis Gaitsgory (Harvard),
The Appearance of the Langlands Dual Group


In this lecture we will be concerned with the (so far unique) geometric construction of the Langlands dual group. This construction lies in the core of the whole field.

For a group G, its dual appears via the Tannakian duality. In other words, the group ^LG will not be given in terms of generators and relations, but rather by means of the category of its finite dimensional representations.

It is this category that admits a geometric description. Namely, it can be realized by *perverse sheaves* on a certain geometric object attached to G, called the affine Grassmannian. Such a description of ^LG allows us to state the geometric Langlands conjecture for an arbitrary group G (and not just GL(n)), which we will do at the end of the lecture.