The tame Deligne-Simpson problem

Abstract

The objective of this article is to prove the necessity statement in Crawley-Boevey's conjectural solution to the (tame) Deligne-Simpson problem. We use the nonabelian Hodge correspondence, variation of parabolic weights and results of Schedler-Tirelli to reduce to simpler situations, where every conjugacy class is semi-simple and the underlying quiver is (1) an affine Dynkin diagram or (2) an affine Dynkin diagram with an extra vertex. In case (1), a nonexistence result of Kostov applies. In case (2), the key step is to show that simple representations, if exist, lie in the same connected component as direct sums of lower dimensional ones.