Mod p Reducibility of Unramified Representations of Finite Groups of Lie Type

Dedicated to the memory of Professor A. I. Kostrikin The main problem under discussion is to determine, for quasi-simplegroups of Lie type G, irreducible representations of G thatremain irreducible under reduction modulo the natural primep. The method is new. It works only for p >3 and for representations that can be realized over an unramified extension of Q_p, thefield of p -adic numbers. Under these assumptions, the mainresult says that the trivial and the Steinberg representationsof G are the only representations in question provided G isnot of type A1. This is not true for G=SL(2, p). The paper containsa result of independent interest on infinitesimally irrreduciblerepresentations of G over an algebraically closed field ofcharacteristic p. Assuming that G is not of rank 1 and G G₂(5),it is proved that either the Jordan normal form of a root elementcontains a block of size d with 1<d<p -1 or the highestweight of is equal to p -1 times the sum of the fundamentalweights. 2000 Mathematical Subject Classification: 20C33, 20G15.