Homological Stability for Spaces of Commuting Elements in Lie Groups

Abstract

In this paper, we study homological stability for spaces Hom(Zn,G) of pairwise commuting n-tuples in a Lie group G⁠. We prove that for each n⩾1⁠, these spaces satisfy rational homological stability as G ranges through any of the classical sequences of compact, connected Lie groups, or their complexifications. We prove similar results for rational equivariant homology, for character varieties, and for the infinite-dimensional analogues of these spaces, Comm(G) and BcomG⁠, introduced by Cohen–Stafa and Adem–Cohen–Torres-Giese, respectively. In addition, we show that the rational homology of the space of unordered commuting n-tuples in a fixed group G stabilizes as n increases. Our proofs use the theory of representation stability—in particular, the theory of FIW-modules developed by Church–Ellenberg–Farb and Wilson. In all of the these results, we obtain specific bounds on the stable range, and we show that the homology isomorphisms are induced by maps of spaces.