Nilpotent Orbits, Primitive Ideals, and Characteristic Classes

- A nilpotent orbit is an orbit of the adjoint action of G on g which contains the zero element of g in its closure. (For the special linear group 2 G = SL(n,C), whose Lie algebra 9 is all n x n matrices with trace zero, an adjoint orbit consists of all matrices with a given Jordan canonical form;