The Brauer loop scheme and orbital varieties

A. Joseph invented multidegrees in [Jo84] to study orbital varieties, which are the components of an orbital scheme, itself constructed by intersecting a nilpotent orbit with a Borel subalgebra. Their multidegrees, known as Joseph polynomials, give a basis of a (Springer) representation of the Weyl group. In the case of the nilpotent orbit $\{ M^2=0 \}$, the orbital varieties can be indexed by noncrossing chord diagrams in the disc. In this paper we study the normal cone to the orbital scheme inside this nilpotent orbit $\{ M^2 = 0 \}$. This gives a better-motivated construction of the Brauer loop scheme we introduced in [KZJ07], whose components are indexed by all chord diagrams (now possibly with crossings) in the disc. The multidegrees of its components, the Brauer loop varieties, were shown to reproduce the ground state of the Brauer loop model in statistical mechanics [DFZJ06]. Here, we reformulate and slightly generalize these multidegrees in order to express them as solutions of the rational quantum Knizhnik--Zamolodchikov equation associated to the Brauer algebra. In particular, the vector of the multidegrees satisfies two sets of equations, corresponding to the $e_i$ and $f_i$ generators of the Brauer algebra. We describe here the geometric meaning of both $e_i$ and $f_i$ equations in our slightly extended setting. We also describe the corresponding actions at the level of orbital varieties: while only the $e_i$ equations make sense directly on the Joseph polynomials, the $f_i$ equations also appear if one introduces a broader class of varieties. We explain the connection of the latter with matrix Schubert varieties.