Motivic Chern Classes of Schubert cells, Hecke algebras, and applications to Casselman's problem

Paolo Aluffi, Leonardo C. Mihalcea, Jörg Schürmann, Changjian Su

Motivic Chern classes are elements in the K theory of an algebraic variety $X$ depending on an extra parameter $y$. They are determined by functoriality and a normalization property. In this paper we calculate the motivic Chern classes of Schubert cells in the (equivariant) K-theory flag manifolds $G/B$. The calculation is recursive starting from the class of a point, and using the Demazure-Lusztig operators in the Hecke algebra. The resulting classes are conjectured to satisfy a positivity property. We use the recursions to give a new proof that they are equivalent to certain K-theoretic stable envelopes recently defined by Okounkov and collaborators, thus recovering results of Feh{\'e}r, Rim{\'a}nyi and Weber. The Hecke algebra action on the K-theory of the dual flag manifold matches the Hecke action on the Iwahori invariants of the principal series representation associated to an unramified character for a group over a nonarchimedean local field. This gives a correspondence identifying the Poincar{\'e} dual version of the motivic Chern class to the standard basis in the Iwahori invariants, and the fixed point basis to Casselman's basis. We apply this to prove two conjectures of Bump, Nakasuji and Naruse concerning factorizations, and holomorphic properties, of the coefficients in the transition matrix between the standard and the Casselman's basis.