We study the germs at the origin of $G$-representation varieties and the degree 1 cohomology jump loci of fundamental groups of quasi-projective manifolds. Using the Morgan–Dupont model associated to a convenient compactification of such a manifold, we relate these germs to those of their infinitesimal counterparts, defined in terms of flat connections on those models. When the linear algebraic group $G$ is either $\text{SL}_{2}(\mathbb{C})$ or its standard Borel subgroup and the depth of the jump locus is 1, this dictionary works perfectly, allowing us to describe in this way explicit irreducible decompositions for the germs of these embedded jump loci. On the other hand, if either $G=\text{SL}_{n}(\mathbb{C})$ for some $n\geqslant 3$, or the depth is greater than 1, then certain natural inclusions of germs are strict.

Finite $W$-algebras are certain associative algebras arising in Lie theory. Each $W$-algebra is constructed from a pair of a semisimple Lie algebra ${\mathfrak{g}}$ (our base field is algebraically closed and of characteristic 0) and its nilpotent element $e$. In this paper we classify finite-dimensional irreducible modules with integral central character over $W$-algebras. In more detail, in a previous paper the first author proved that the component group $A(e)$ of the centralizer of the nilpotent element under consideration acts on the set of finite-dimensional irreducible modules over the $W$-algebra and the quotient set is naturally identified with the set of primitive ideals in $U({\mathfrak{g}})$ whose associated variety is the closure of the adjoint orbit of $e$. In this paper, for a given primitive ideal with integral central character, we compute the corresponding $A(e)$-orbit. The answer is that the stabilizer of that orbit is basically a subgroup of $A(e)$ introduced by G. Lusztig. In the proof we use a variety of different ingredients: the structure theory of primitive ideals and Harish-Chandra bimodules for semisimple Lie algebras, the representation theory of $W$-algebras, the structure theory of cells and Springer representations, and multi-fusion monoidal categories.

In this article, we study the homomorphisms between scalar generalized Verma modules. We conjecture that any homomorphism between scalar generalized Verma modules is a composition of elementary homomorphisms. The purpose of this article is to confirm the conjecture for some parabolic subalgebras under the assumption that the infinitesimal characters are regular.