Two-row nilpotent orbits of cyclic quivers

We prove that the local intersection cohomology of nilpotent orbit closures of cyclic quivers is trivial when the two orbits involved correspond to partitions with at most two rows. This gives a geometric proof of a result of Graham and Lehrer, which states that standard modules of the affine Hecke algebra of GL_d corresponding to nilpotents with at most two Jordan blocks are multiplicity-free. Received: 7 February 2002 / Published online: 8 November 2002