Extensions, Levi subgroups and character formulas

This paper consists of three interconnected parts. Parts I,III study the relationship between the cohomology of a reductive group and that of a Levi subgroup. For example, we provide a necessary condition, arising from Kazhdan-Lusztig theory, for the natural map on Ext-groups of irreducible modules to be surjective. In cohomological degree 1, the map is always an isomorphism, under our hypothesis. These results were inspired by recent work of Hemmer obtained for general linear groups, and they both extend and improve upon his work when our condition is met. Part II obtains results on Lusztig character formulas for reductive groups, obtaining new necessary and sufficient conditions for such formulas to hold. In the special case of general linear groups, these conditions can be recast in a striking way completely in terms of explicit representation theoretic properties of the symmetric group (and the results improve upon the sufficient cohomological conditions established recently in the authors).