Abstract:
The behaviour of a product of commuting long and short root elements of the group of type $B_r$ in $p$-restricted irreducible representations is investigated. For such representations with certain local properties of highest weights it is shown that the images of these elements have Jordan blocks of all a priori possible sizes. For a $p$-restricted representation with highest weight $a_1\omega_1+\dots+a_r\omega_r$ this fact is proved when $a_j\neq p-1$ for some $j<r-1$ and one of the following holds:
1) $a_r\neq p-1$ and $\sum_{i=1}^{r-2}a_i\geq p-1$;
2) $2a_{r-1}+a_r<p$, $\sum_{i=1}^{r-3}a_i\neq0$ for $2a_{r-1}+a_r=p-2$ or $p-1$ and $\sum_{i=1}^{r-3}a_i\neq0$ or $(r-3)(p-1)$ for $a_r=p-1$.
Key words and phrases:representations of algebraic groups, unipotent elements, block structure.