Steenrod operators, the Coulomb branch and the Frobenius twist

Abstract

AbstractWe observe a fundamental relationship between Steenrod operations and the Artin–Schreier morphism. We use Steenrod's construction, together with some new geometry related to the affine Grassmannian, to prove that the quantum Coulomb branch is a Frobenius-constant quantization. We also demonstrate the corresponding result for the $K$-theoretic version of the quantum Coulomb branch. At the end of the paper, we investigate what our ideas produce on the categorical level. We find that they yield, after a little fiddling, a construction which corresponds, under the geometric Satake equivalence, to the Frobenius twist functor for representations of the Langlands dual group. We also describe the unfiddled answer, conditional on a conjectural ‘modular derived Satake’, and, though it is more complicated to state, it is in our opinion just as neat and even more compelling.