This work is concerned with Bielawski’s hyperkähler slices in the cotangent bundles of homogeneous affine varieties. One can associate such a slice with the data of a complex semisimple Lie group
G, a reductive subgroup
H\subseteq G, and a Slodowy slice
S\subseteq \mathfrak{g}:=\text{Lie}(G), defining it to be the hyperkähler quotient of
T^{\ast }(G/H)\times (G\times S) by a maximal compact subgroup of
G. This hyperkähler slice is empty in some of the most elementary cases (e.g., when
S is regular and
(G,H)=(\text{SL}_{n+1},\text{GL}_{n}),
n\geqslant 3), prompting us to seek necessary and sufficient conditions for non-emptiness.
We give a spherical-geometric characterization of the non-empty hyperkähler slices that arise when
S=S_{\text{reg}} is a regular Slodowy slice, proving that non-emptiness is equivalent to the so-called
\mathfrak{a}-regularity of
(G,H). This
\mathfrak{a}-regularity condition is formulated in several equivalent ways, one being a concrete condition on the rank and complexity of
G/H. We also provide a classification of the
\mathfrak{a}-regular pairs
(G,H) in which
H is a reductive spherical subgroup. Our arguments make essential use of Knop’s results on moment map images and Losev’s algorithm for computing Cartan spaces.