The combinatorics of GL_n generalized Gelfand--Graev characters

Introduced by Kawanaka in order to find the unipotent representations of finite groups of Lie type, generalized Gelfand--Graev characters have remained somewhat mysterious. Even in the case of the finite general linear groups, the combinatorics of their decompositions has not been worked out. This paper re-interprets Kawanaka's definition in type $A$ in a way that gives far more flexibility in computations. We use these alternate constructions to show how to obtain generalized Gelfand--Graev representations directly from the maximal unipotent subgroups. We also explicitly decompose the corresponding generalized Gelfand--Graev characters in terms of unipotent representations, thereby recovering the Kostka--Foulkes polynomials as multiplicities.