Springer Correspondence for Symmetric Spaces
We consider the Springer correspondence in the case of symmetric spaces. In this setting various new phenomena occur which are not present in the classical Springer theory. For example, we obtain representations of (the Tits extension) of the braid group rather than just Weyl group representations. These representations arise from cohomology of families of certain (Hessenberg) varieties. In particular, in this paper we encounter the universal families of hyperelliptic curves. As an application we calculate the cohomolgy of Fano varieties of $k$-planes in the smooth intersection of two quadrics in an even dimensional projective space.