We reduce some key calculations of compositions of morphisms between Soergel bimodules (" Soergel calculus") to calculations in the nil Hecke ring (" Schubert calculus"). This formula has several applications in modular representation theory.

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).

There are two changes in comparison to the original version: Part (1). The union must be split up according to Jb/(Jb Ker (G)). This is also important for the description of the closure relations between strata: An analogous correction needs to be made in Prop. 7.2. 2. See Section 3 below.

Let <i>H</i> denote a spherical subgroup within a semisimple algebraic group <i>G</i>. In this paper we study the closures of the finitely many <i>H</i>-orbits in the flag variety of <i>G</i>. Using the language of Frobenius splitting we provide a criterion for these closures to have nice geometric and cohomological properties. We then show how the criterion applies to the spherical subgroups of minimal rank studied by N. Ressayre. Finally, we also provide applications of the criterion to orbit closures which are not multiplicity-free in the sense defined by M. Brion.

We classify the Ext-quivers of hearts in the bounded derived category D(A_n) and the finite-dimensional derived category D(\Gamma_N A_n) of the Calabi-Yau-N Ginzburg algebra D(\Gamma_N A_n). This provides the classification for Buan-Thomas' colored quiver for higher clusters of A-type. We also give explicit combinatorial constructions from a binary tree with n+2 leaves to a torsion pair in mod k\overrightarrow{A_n} and a cluster tilting set in the corresponding cluster category, for the straight oriented A-type quiver \overrightarrow{A_n}. As an application, we show that the orientation of the n-dimensional ssociahedron induced by poset structure of binary trees coincides with the orientation induced by poset structure of torsion pairs in mod k\overrightarrow{A_n} (under the correspondence above).