Containment Relations among Spherical Subgroups

Abstract: A closed subgroup $H$ of a connected reductive group $G$ is called $\textit{spherical}$ if a Borel subgroup in $G$ has an open orbit on $G/H$. We give a combinatorial characterization for a spherical subgroup to be contained in another one which generalizes previous work by Knop. As an application, we compute the Luna datum of the identity component of a spherical subgroup which yields a characterization of connectedness for spherical subgroups.