Hypergeometric functions on reductive groups

The A-hypergeometric system studied by I.M. Gelfand, M.I. Graev, A.V. Zelevinsky and the author, is defined for a set A of characters of an algebraic torus. In this paper we propose a generalization of the theory where the torus is replaced by an arbitrary reductive group H and A is a set of irreducible representations of H. The functions are thus defined on the space M_A of functions on H spanned by the matrix elements of representations from A. The properties of the system are related to the geometry of a certain algebraic variety X_A, which belongs to the class of group compactifications studied by De Concini and Procesi. We develop the theory of Euler integral representations for these generalized hypergeometric functions (with integrals taken over cycles in H). We also construct the analogs of hypergeometric series, by expanding the delta-function along a subgroup into a power series and taking the termwise Fourier transform.