The Drinfeld-Lafforgue-Vinberg degeneration I: Picard-Lefschetz oscillators

We study the singularities of the Drinfeld-Lafforgue-Vinberg compactification of the moduli stack of G-bundles on a smooth projective curve for a reductive group G. The study of these compactifications was initiated by V. Drinfeld (for G=GL_2) and continued by L. Lafforgue (for G=GL_n) in their work on the Langlands correspondence for function fields. A definition of the compactification for a general reductive group G is also due to Drinfeld and relies on the Vinberg semigroup of G; this case will be dealt with in [Sch]. In the present paper we focus on the case G=SL_2. In this case the compactification can alternatively be viewed as a canonical one-parameter degeneration of the moduli space of SL_2-bundles. We study the singularities of this one-parameter degeneration via the weight-monodromy theory of the associated nearby cycles construction: We give an explicit description of the nearby cycles sheaf together with its monodromy action in terms of certain novel perverse sheaves which we call "Picard-Lefschetz oscillators", and then use this description to determine the intersection cohomology sheaf. Our proofs rely on the construction of certain local models for the one-parameter degeneration which themselves form one-parameter families of spaces which are factorizable in the sense of Beilinson and Drinfeld. We also include an application on the level of functions.