Stable sheaf cohomology on flag varieties

Abstract: We prove an effective stabilization result for the sheaf cohomology groups of line bundles on flag varieties parametrizing complete flags in k^n, as well as for the sheaf cohomology groups of polynomial functors applied to the cotangent sheaf Omega on projective space. In characteristic zero, these are natural consequences of the Borel-Weil-Bott theorem, but in characteristic p>0 they are non-trivial. Unlike many important contexts in modular representation theory, where the prime characteristic p is assumed to be large relative to n, in our study we fix p and let n go to infinity. We illustrate the general theory by providing explicit stable cohomology calculations in a number of cases of interest. Our examples yield cohomology groups where the number of indecomposable summands has super-polynomial growth, and also show that the cohomological degrees where non-vanishing occurs do not form a connected interval. In the case of polynomial functors of Omega, we prove a Kunneth formula for stable cohomology, and show the invariance of stable cohomology under Frobenius, which combined with the Steinberg tensor product theorem yields calculations of stable cohomology for an interesting class of simple polynomial functors arising in the work of Doty. The results in the special case of symmetric powers of Omega provide a nice application to commutative algebra, yielding a sharp vanishing result for Koszul modules of finite length in all characteristics.