A REALIZATION OF THE ENVELOPING SUPERALGEBRA

In [2], Beilinson–Lusztig–MacPherson (BLM) gave a beautiful realization for quantum $\mathfrak {gl}_n$ via a geometric setting of quantum Schur algebras. We introduce the notion of affine Schur superalgebras and use them as a bridge to link the structure and representations of the universal enveloping superalgebra ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ of the loop algebra $\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n}$ of ${\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n}$ with those of affine symmetric groups ${\widehat {{\mathfrak S}}_{r}}$ . Then, we give a BLM type realization of ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ via affine Schur superalgebras. The first application of the realization of ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ is to determine the action of ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ on tensor spaces of the natural representation of $\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n}$ . These results in epimorphisms from $\;{\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ to affine Schur superalgebras so that the bridging relation between representations of ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ and ${\widehat {{\mathfrak S}}_{r}}$ is established. As a second application, we construct a Kostant type $\mathbb Z$ -form for ${\mathcal U}_{\mathbb Q}(\widehat {\mathfrak {gl}}_{m|n})$ whose images under the epimorphisms above are exactly the integral affine Schur superalgebras. In this way, we obtain essentially the super affine Schur–Weyl duality in arbitrary characteristics.