We study a class of perverse sheaves on some spherical varieties which include the strata of the De ConciniProcesi completion of a symmetric variety. This is a generalization of the theory of (parabolic) character sheaves.

Let W a be an affine Weyl group and : W a W 0 be the natural projection to the corresponding finite Weyl group. We say that w W a has finite Coxeter part if (w) is conjugate to a Coxeter element of W 0. The elements with finite Coxeter part are a union of conjugacy classes of W a. We show that for each conjugacy class O of W a with finite Coxeter part there exists a unique maximal proper parabolic subgroup W J of W a, such that the set of minimal length elements in O is exactly the set of Coxeter elements in W J. Similar results hold for twisted conjugacy classes.

The unipotent variety of a reductive algebraic group G plays an important role in the representation theory. In this paper, we will consider the closure U of the unipotent variety in the De ConciniProcesi compactification G of a connected simple algebraic group G. We will prove that U-U is a union of some G-stable pieces introduced by Lusztig in [Moscow Math. J 4 (2004) 869896]. This was first conjectured by Lusztig. We will also give an explicit description of U. It turns out that similar results hold for the closure of any Steinberg fiber in G.

In this paper, we study some relation between the cocenter H(G) of the Hecke algebra H (G) of a connected reductive group G over a nonarchimedean local field and the cocenter H(M) of its Levi subgroups M. Given any Newton component of H(G), we construct the induction map i from the corresponding Newton component of H(M) to it. We show that this map is an isomorphism. This leads to the BernsteinLusztig type presentation of the cocenter H(G), which generalizes the work [11] on the affine Hecke algebras. We also show that the map i we constructed is adjoint to the Jacquet functor.

The cocenter of an affine Hecke algebra plays an important role in the study of representations of the affine Hecke algebra and the geometry of affine DeligneLusztig varieties (see for example, He and Nie in Compos Math 150(11):19031927, 2014; He in Ann Math 179:367404, 2014; Ciubotaru and He in Cocenter and representations of affine Hecke algebras, 2014). In this paper, we give a BernsteinLusztig type presentation of the cocenter. We also obtain a comparison theorem between the class polynomials of the affine Hecke algebra and those of its parabolic subalgebras, which is an algebraic analog of the HodgeNewton decomposition theorem for affine DeligneLusztig varieties. As a consequence, we present a new proof of the emptiness pattern of affine DeligneLusztig varieties (Grtz et al. in Compos Math 146(5):13391382, 2010; Grtz et al. in Ann Sci cole Norm Sup, 2012).