Character sheaves on the semi-stable locus of a group compactification

We study the intermediate extension of the character sheaves on an adjoint group to the semi-stable locus of its wonderful compactification. We show that the intermediate extension can be described by a direct image construction. As a consequence, we show that the “ordinary” restriction of a character sheaf on the compactification to a “semi-stable stratum” is a shift of semisimple perverse sheaf and is closely related to Lusztig's restriction functor (from a character sheaf on a reductive group to a direct sum of character sheaves on a Levi subgroup). We also provide a (conjectural) formula for the boundary values inside the semi-stable locus of an irreducible character of a finite group of Lie type, which gives a partial answer to a question of Springer (2006) [21]. This formula holds for Steinberg character and characters coming from generic character sheaves. In the end, we verify Lusztig's conjecture Lusztig (2004) [16, 12.6] inside the semi-stable locus of the wonderful compactification.