Auslander-Reiten combinatorics and $q$-characters of representations of affine quantum groups

Abstract: For each simple Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ of simply-laced type, Hernandez and Leclerc introduced a certain category $\mathcal{C}{\mathbb{Z}}$ of finite-dimensional representations of the quantum affine algebra of $\mathfrak{g}$, as well as certain subcategories $\mathcal{C}{\mathbb{Z}}^{\leq \xi}$ depending on a choice of height function adapted to an orientation of the Dynkin graph of $\mathfrak{g}$. In our previous work we constructed an algebra homomorphism $\widetilde{D}{\xi}$ whose domain contains the image of the Grothendieck ring of $\mathcal{C}{\mathbb{Z}}^{\leq \xi}$ under the truncated $q$-character morphism $\widetilde{\chi}q$ corresponding to $\xi$. We exhibited a close relationship between the composition of $\widetilde{D}{\xi}$ with $\widetilde{\chi}q$ and the morphism $\overline{D}$ recently introduced by Baumann, Kamnitzer and Knutson in their study of the equivariant homology of Mirkovi\'c-Vilonen cycles. In this paper, we extend $\widetilde{D}{\xi}$ in order to investigate its composition with Frenkel-Reshetikhin's original $q$-character morphism. Our main result consists in proving that the $q$-characters of all standard modules in $\mathcal{C}{\mathbb{Z}}$ lie in the kernel of $\widetilde{D}{\xi}$. This provides a large family of new non-trivial rational identities suggesting possible geometric interpretations.