In this paper, we study the relationship between the cocenter and the representation theory of affine Hecke algebras. The approach is based on the interaction between the rigid cocenter, an important subspace of the cocenter, and the dual object in representation theory, the rigid quotient of the Grothendieck group of finite dimensional representations.

This paper is a contribution to the general problem of giving an explicit description of the basic locus in the reduction modulo $p$ of Shimura varieties. Motivated by \cite{Vollaard-Wedhorn} and \cite{Rapoport-Terstiege-Wilson}, we classify the cases where the basic locus is (in a natural way) the union of classical Deligne-Lusztig sets associated to Coxeter elements. We show that if this is satisfied, then the Newton strata and Ekedahl-Oort strata have many nice properties.

In this paper, we prove a conjecture of Kottwitz and Rapoport on a union of (generalized) affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties $X(\mu, b)_J$ for a $p$-adic group $G$ and its parahoric subgroup $P_J$. We show that $X(\mu, b)_J \neq \emptyset$ if and only if the group-theoretic version of Mazur's inequality is satisfied. In the process, we obtain a generalization of Grothendieck's conjecture on the closure relation of $\s$-conjugacy classes of a twisted loop group.

Let $W$ be an extended affine Weyl group. We prove that the minimal length elements $w_{\co}$ of any conjugacy class $\co$ of $W$ satisfy some nice properties, generalizing results of Geck and Pfeiffer \cite{GP} on finite Weyl groups. We also study a special class of conjugacy classes, the straight conjugacy classes. These conjugacy classes are in a natural bijection with the Frobenius-twisted conjugacy classes of some $p$-adic group and satisfy additional interesting properties. Furthermore, we discuss some applications to the affine Hecke algebra $H$. We prove that $T_{w_\co}$, where $\co$ ranges over all the conjugacy classes of $W$, forms a basis of the cocenter $H/[H, H]$. We also introduce the class polynomials, which play a crucial role in the study of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties \cite{H99}.

We prove that in the unramified case, local models of Shimura varieties with Iwahori level structure are normal and Cohen Macaulay.