External Vertices for Crystals of Affine Type A

We demonstrate that for a fixed dominant integral weight and fixed defect d, there are only a finite number of Morita equivalence classes of blocks of cyclotomic Hecke algebras, by combining some combinatorics with the Chuang-Rouquier categorification of integrable highest weight modules over Kac-Moody algebras of affine type A. This is an extension of a proof for symmetric groups of a conjecture known as Donovan’s conjecture. We fix a dominant integral weight Λ. The blocks of cyclotomic Hecke algebras \(H^{\Lambda }_{n}\) for the given Λ correspond to the weights P(Λ) of a highest weight representation with highest weight Λ. We connect these weights into a graph we call the reduced crystal \(\widehat {P}({\Lambda })\), in which vertices are connected by i-strings. We define the hub of a weight and show that a vertex is i-external for a residue i if the defect is less than the absolute value of the i-component of the hub. We demonstrate the existence of a bound on the degree after which all vertices of a given defect d are i-external in at least one i-string, lying at the high degree end of the i-string. For e = 2, we calculate an approximation to this bound.