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Catalan Functions and $k$-Schur functions

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

Li-Chung Chen and Mark Haiman studied a family of symmetric functions called Catalan (symmetric) functions which are indexed by pairs consisting of a partition contained in the staircase $(n-1, ..., 1,0)$ (of which there are Catalan many) and a composition weight of length $n$. They include the Schur functions ,the Hall-Littlewood polynomials and their parabolic generalizations. They can be defined by a Demazure-operator formula, and are equal to GL-equivariant Euler characteristics of vector bundles on the flag variety by the Borel-Weil-Bott theorem. We have discovered various properties of Catalan functions, providing a new insight on the existing theorems and conjectures inspired by Macdonald positivity conjecture. A key discovery in our work is an elegant set of ideals of roots that the associated Catalan functions are $k$-Schur functions and proved that graded $k$-Schur functions are G-equivariant Euler characteristics of vector bundles on the flag variety, settling a conjecture of Chen-Haiman. We exposed a new shift invariance property of the graded $k$-Schur functions and resolved the Schur positivity and $k$-branching conjectures by providing direct combinatorial formulas using strong marked tableaux. We conjectured that Catalan functions with a partition weight are $k$-Schur positive which strengthens the Schur positivity of Catalan function conjecture by Chen-Haiman and resolved the conjecture with positive combinatorial formulas in cases which capture and refine a variety of problems. This is joint work with Jonah Blasiak, Jennifer Morse and Daniel Summers.

Mathematics; Group theory and generalizations; Combinatorics

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Drexel University

2019-07-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71070

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/