Character D-modules via Drinfeld center of Harish-Chandra bimodules

The category of character D-modules is realized as Drinfeld center of the abelian monoidal category of Harish-Chandra bimodules. Tensor product of Harish-Chandra bimodules is related to convolution of D-modules via the long intertwining functor (Radon transform) by a result of Beilinson and Ginzburg (Represent. Theory 3, 1-31, 1999). Exactness property of the long intertwining functor on a cell subquotient of the Harish-Chandra bimodules category shows that the truncated convolution category of Lusztig (Adv. Math. 129, 85-98, 1997) can be realized as a subquotient of the category of Harish-Chandra bimodules. Together with the description of the truncated convolution category (Bezrukavnikov et al. in Isr. J. Math. 170, 207-234, 2009) this allows us to derive (under a mild technical assumption) a classification of irreducible character sheaves over ℂ obtained by Lusztig by a different method. We also give a simple description for the top cohomology of convolution of character sheaves over ℂ in a given cell modulo smaller cells and relate the so-called Harish-Chandra functor to Verdier specialization in the De Concini-Procesi compactification.