Higher deformations of Lie algebra representations I

In the late 1980s, Friedlander and Parshall studied the representations of a family of algebras which were obtained as deformations of the distribution algebra of the first Frobenius kernel of an algebraic group. The representation theory of these algebras tells us much about the representation theory of Lie algebras in positive characteristic. We develop an analogue of this family of algebras for the distribution algebras of the higher Frobenius kernels, answering a 30 year old question posed by Friedlander and Parshall. We also examine their representation theory in the case of the special linear group.