One can view a partial flag variety in $\mathbb{C}^n$ as an adjoint orbit $\mathcal{O}_λ$ inside the Lie algebra of $n \times n$ skew-Hermitian matrices. We use the orbit context to study the totally nonnegative part of a partial flag variety from an algebraic, geometric, and dynamical perspective. The paper has three main parts:
(1) We introduce the totally nonnegative part of $\mathcal{O}_λ$, and describe it explicitly in several cases. We define a twist map on it, which generalizes (in type $A$) a map of Bloch, Flaschka, and Ratiu (1990) on an isospectral manifold of Jacobi matrices.
(2) We study gradient flows on $\mathcal{O}_λ$ which preserve positivity, working in three natural Riemannian metrics. In the Kähler metric, positivity is preserved in many cases of interest, extending results of Galashin, Karp, and Lam (2017, 2019). In the normal metric, positivity is essentially never preserved on a generic orbit. In the induced metric, whether positivity is preserved appears to depends on the spacing of the eigenvalues defining the orbit.
(3) We present two applications. First, we discuss the topology of totally nonnegative flag varieties and amplituhedra. Galashin, Karp, and Lam (2017, 2019) showed that the former are homeomorphic to closed balls, and we interpret their argument in the orbit framework. We also show that a new family of amplituhedra, which we call twisted Vandermonde amplituhedra, are homeomorphic to closed balls. Second, we discuss the symmetric Toda flow on $\mathcal{O}_λ$. We show that it preserves positivity, and that on the totally nonnegative part, it is a gradient flow in the Kähler metric up to applying the twist map. This extends a result of Bloch, Flaschka, and Ratiu (1990).
We study totally nonnegative parts of critical varieties in the Grassmannian. We show that each totally nonnegative critical variety Crit$^{\ge0}_f$ is the image of an affine poset cyclohedron under a continuous map and use this map to define a boundary stratification of Crit$^{\ge0}_f$. For the case of the top-dimensional positroid cell, we show that the totally nonnegative critical variety Crit$^{\ge0}_{k,n}$ is homeomorphic to the second hypersimplex $Δ_{2,n}$.
The space of mxp totally nonnegative real matrices has a stratification into totally nonnegative cells. The largest such cell is the space of totally positive matrices. There is a well-known criterion due to Gasca and Peña for testing a real matrix for total positivity. This criterion involves testing mp minors. In contrast, there is no known small set of minors for testing for total nonnegativity. In this paper, we show that for each of the totally nonnegative cells there is a test for membership which only involves mp minors, thus extending the Gasca and Peña result to all totally nonnegativ…
In this survey article, we describe recent work that connects three separate objects of interest: totally nonnegative matrices; quantum matrices; and matrix Poisson varieties.
We describe explicitly the admissible families of minors for the totally nonnegative cells of real matrices, that is, the families of minors that produce nonempty cells in the cell decompositions of spaces of totally nonnegative matrices introduced by A. Postnikov. In order to do this, we relate the totally nonnegative cells to torus orbits of symplectic leaves of the Poisson varieties of complex matrices. In particular, we describe the minors that vanish on a torus orbit of symplectic leaves, we prove that such families of minors are exactly the admissible families, and we show that the nonem…
The totally nonnegative flag variety was introduced by Lusztig. It has enriched combinatorial, geometric, and Lie-theoretic structures. In this paper, we introduce a (new) $J$-total positivity on the full flag variety of an arbitrary Kac-Moody group, generalizing the (ordinary) total positivity. We show that the $J$-totally nonnegative flag variety has a cellular decomposition into totally positive $J$-Richardson varieties. Moreover, each totally positive $J$-Richardson variety admits a favorable decomposition, called a product structure. Combined with the generalized Poincare conjecture, we p…
We generalize the well known characterizations of totally nonnegative and oscillatory matrices, due to F.R.Gantmacher, M.G.Krein, A.Whitney, C.Loewner, M.Gasca, and J.M.Pena to the case of an arbitrary complex semisimple Lie group.
We prove that three spaces of importance in topological combinatorics are homeomorphic to closed balls: the totally nonnegative Grassmannian, the compactification of the space of electrical networks, and the cyclically symmetric amplituhedron.
We provide a short proof of a classical result of Kasteleyn, and prove several variants thereof. One of these results has become key in the parametrization of positroid varieties, and thus deserves the short direct proof which we provide.
The McMullen Correspondence gives a linear dependence between M-sequences of length |d/2|+1 and f-vectors of simplical d-polytopes. Denote the transfer matrix between g and f by M_d. Recently, Bjorner proved that any 2x2-minor of M_d is nonnegative and conjectured that the same would be true for arbitrary minors. In this paper we answer the question in the affirmative.
Postnikov constructed a decomposition of a totally nonnegative Grassmannian into positroid cells. We provide combinatorial formulas that allow one to decide which cell a given point belongs to and to determine affine coordinates of the point within this cell. This simplifies Postnikov's description of the inverse boundary measurement map and generalizes formulas for the top cell given by Speyer and Williams. In addition, we identify a particular subset of Pluecker coordinates as a totally positive base for the set of non-vanishing Pluecker coordinates for a given positroid cell.
We investigate the tropical analogues of totally positive and totally nonnegative matrices. These arise when considering the images by the nonarchimedean valuation of the corresponding classes of matrices over a real nonarchimedean valued field, like the field of real Puiseux series. We show that the nonarchimedean valuation sends the totally positive matrices precisely to the Monge matrices. This leads to explicit polyhedral representations of the tropical analogues of totally positive and totally nonnegative matrices. We also show that tropical totally nonnegative matrices with a finite perm…
These are lecture notes intended to supplement my second lecture at the Current Developments in Mathematics conference in 2014. In the first half of article, we give an introduction to the totally nonnegative Grassmannian together with a survey of some more recent work. In the second half of the article, we give a definition of a Grassmann polytope motivated by work of physicists on the amplituhedron. We propose to use Schubert calculus and canonical bases to replace linear algebra and convexity in the theory of polytopes.
Postnikov constructed a cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. The poset of cells can be described (in particular) via Grassmann necklaces. We study certain quiver Grassmannians for the cyclic quiver admitting a cellular decomposition, whose cells are naturally labeled by Grassmann necklaces. We show that the posets of cells coincide with the reversed cell posets of the cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. We investigate algebro-geometric and combinatorial properties of these quiver Grassmannians. In particular, we describe the irreducible …
We study the totally non-negative part of the complete flag variety and of its tropicalization. We start by showing that Lusztig's notion of non-negative complete flag variety coincides with the flags in the complete flag variety which have non-negative Plücker coordinates. This mirrors the characterization of the totally non-negative Grassmannian as those points in the Grassmannian with all non-negative Plücker coordinates. We then study the tropical complete flag variety and complete flag Dressian, which are two tropical versions of the complete flag variety, capturing realizable and abstrac…
We show that the set of totally positive unipotent lower-triangular Toeplitz matrices in $GL_n$ form a real semi-algebraic cell of dimension $n-1$. Furthermore we prove a natural cell decomposition for its closure. The proof uses properties of the quantum cohomology rings of the partial flag varieties of $GL_n(\C)$ relying in particular on the positivity of the structure constants, which are enumerative Gromov--Witten invariants. We also give a characterization of total positivity for Toeplitz matrices in terms of the (quantum) Schubert classes. This work builds on some results of Dale Peterso…
The algebra of quantum matrices of a given size supports a rational torus action by automorphisms. It follows from work of Letzter and the first named author that to understand the prime and primitive spectra of this algebra, the first step is to understand the prime ideals that are invariant under the torus action. In this paper, we prove that a family of quantum minors is the set of all quantum minors that belong to a given torus-invariant prime ideal of a quantum matrix algebra if and only if the corresponding family of minors defines a non-empty totally nonnegative cell in the space of tot…
Using the relationship between totally nonnegative matrices and directed acyclic weighted planar networks, we show that $2\times 2$ minors of minor matrices of totally nonnegative matrices are also nonnegative. We give a combinatorial interpretation for the minors of minor matrices in terms of the weights of families of paths in a network.
There is a cell decomposition of the nonnegative Grassmannian. For each cell, totally positive bases(TP-bases) is defined as the minimal set of Plücker variables such that all other nonzero Plücker variables in the cell can be expressed in those variables in a subtraction-free rational function. This is the generalization of the TP-bases defined for nonnegative part of $GL_k$ defined in \cite{FZ5}. For each cell, we have a $\LE$-diagram and a natural way to label the dots inside the diagram with Plücker variables. Those set of Plücker variables form a TP-bases of the cell. Using mutations comi…
In this paper we study the partially ordered set Q^J of cells in Rietsch's cell decomposition of the totally nonnegative part of an arbitrary flag variety P^J_{\geq 0}. Our goal is to understand the geometry of P^J_{\geq 0}: Lusztig has proved that this space is contractible, but it is unknown whether the closure of each cell is contractible, and whether P^J_{\geq 0} is homeomorphic to a ball. The order complex |Q^J| is a simplicial complex which can be thought of as a combinatorial approximation of P^J_{\geq 0}. Using combinatorial tools such as Bjorner's EL-labellings and Dyer's reflection o…
Given a matrix $A$, let $A_{I,J}$ denote the submatrix of $A$ determined by rows $I$ and columns $J$. Fischer's Inequalities state that for each $n \times n$ Hermitian positive semidefinite matrix $A$, and each subset $I$ of $\{1,\dotsc,n\}$ and its complement $I^c$, we have $\det(A) \leq \det(A_{I,I})\det(A_{I^c,I^c})$. Barrett and Johnson (Linear Multilinear Algebra 34, 1993) extended these to state inequalities for sums of products of principal minors whose orders are given by nonincreasing integer sequences $(λ_1,\dotsc,λ_r)$, $(μ_1,\dotsc,μ_s)$ summing to $n$. Specifically, if $λ_1+\cdots…
In a seminal 1994 paper, Lusztig extended the theory of total positivity by introducing the totally non-negative part (G/P)_{\geq 0} of an arbitrary (generalized, partial) flag variety G/P. He referred to this space as a "remarkable polyhedral subspace", and conjectured a decomposition into cells, which was subsequently proven by the first author. Subsequently the second author made the concrete conjecture that this cell decomposed space is the next best thing to a polyhedron, by conjecturing it to be a regular CW complex that is homeomorphic to a closed ball. In this article we use discrete M…
A matrix is called totally positive (resp. totally nonnegative) if all its minors are positive (resp. nonnegative). Consider the Ising model with free boundary conditions and no external field on a planar graph $G$. Let $a_1,\dots,a_k,b_k,\dots,b_1$ be vertices placed in a counterclockwise order on the outer face of $G$. We show that the $k\times k$ matrix of the two-point spin correlation functions \[ M_{i,j} = \langle σ_{a_i} σ_{b_j} \rangle \] is totally nonnegative. Moreover, $\det M > 0$ if and only if there exist $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint paths that connect $a_i$ with $b_i$. We also c…
The goal of this paper is to clarify the connection between certain structures from the theory of totally nonnegative Grassmannians, quiver Grassmannians for cyclic quivers and the theory of local models of Shimura varieties. More precisely, we generalize the construction from our previous paper relating the combinatorics and geometry of quiver Grassmanians to that of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. The varieties we are interested in serve as realizations of local models of Shimura varieties. We exploit quiver representation techniques to study the quiver Grassmannians of interest and, …
The aim of this paper is to discuss a relationship between total positivity and planar directed networks. We show that the inverse boundary problem for these networks is naturally linked with the study of the totally nonnegative Grassmannian. We investigate its cell decomposition, where the cells are the totally nonnegative parts of the matroid strata. The boundary measurements of networks give parametrizations of the cells. We present several different combinatorial descriptions of the cells, study the partial order on the cells, and describe how they are glued to each other.
The totally nonnegative Grassmannian is the set of k-dimensional subspaces V of R^n whose nonzero Pluecker coordinates all have the same sign. Gantmakher and Krein (1950) and Schoenberg and Whitney (1951) independently showed that V is totally nonnegative iff every vector in V, when viewed as a sequence of n numbers and ignoring any zeros, changes sign at most k-1 times. We generalize this result from the totally nonnegative Grassmannian to the entire Grassmannian, showing that if V is generic (i.e. has no zero Pluecker coordinates), then the vectors in V change sign at most m times iff certai…
Fix a nonnegative integer $d$, a field $\mathbb{F}$, and a vector space $V$ over $\mathbb{F}$ with dimension $d+1$. Let $T$ denote an invertible upper triangular matrix in ${\rm Mat}_{d+1}(\mathbb{F})$. Using $T$ we construct three flags on $V$. We find a necessary and sufficient condition on $T$ for these three flags to be totally opposite. In this case, we use these three totally opposite flags to construct a Billiard Array $B$ on $V$. It is known that $B$ is determined up to isomorphism by a certain triangular array of scalar parameters called the $B$-values. We compute these $B$-values in …
The (tree) amplituhedron A(n,k,m) is the image in the Grassmannian Gr(k,k+m) of the totally nonnegative part of Gr(k,n), under a (map induced by a) linear map which is totally positive. It was introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka in 2013 in order to give a geometric basis for the computation of scattering amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. When k+m=n, the amplituhedron is isomorphic to the totally nonnegative Grassmannian, and when k=1, the amplituhedron is a cyclic polytope. While the case m=4 is most relevant to physics, the amplituhedron is an interesting mathematical objec…
We study some geometric and combinatorial aspects of the solution to the full Kostant-Toda (f-KT) hierarchy, when the initial data is given by an arbitrary point on the totally non-negative (tnn) flag variety of SL_n(R). The f-KT flows on the tnn flag variety are complete, and their asymptotics are completely determined by the cell decomposition of the tnn flag variety given by Rietsch. We define the f-KT flow on the weight space via the moment map, and show that the closure of each f-KT flow forms an interesting convex polytope generalizing the permutohedron which we call a Bruhat interval po…
This is the first of a series of papers where we develop a theory of total positivity for loop groups. In this paper, we completely describe the totally nonnegative part of the polynomial loop group GL_n(\R[t,t^{-1}]), and for the formal loop group GL_n(\R((t))) we describe the totally nonnegative points which are not totally positive. Furthermore, we make the connection with networks on the cylinder. Our approach involves the introduction of distinguished generators, called whirls and curls, and we describe the commutation relations amongst them. These matrices play the same role as the poles…
We study positivity notions for the tropicalization of type A flag varieties and the flag Dressian. We focus on the hollow case, where we have one constituent of rank 1 and another of corank 1. We characterize the three different notions that exist for this case in terms of Plücker coordinates. These notions are the tropicalization of the totally non-negative flag variety, Bruhat subdivisions and the non-negative flag Dressian. We show the first example where the first two concepts above do not coincide. In this case the non-negative flag Dressian equals the tropicalization of the Plücker non-…
Given integers $1 \le k_1 < \cdots < k_l \le n-1$, let $\text{Fl}_{k_1,\dots,k_l;n}$ denote the type $A$ partial flag variety consisting of all chains of subspaces $(V_{k_1}\subset\cdots\subset V_{k_l})$ inside $\mathbb{R}^n$, where each $V_k$ has dimension $k$. Lusztig (1994, 1998) introduced the totally positive part $\text{Fl}_{k_1,\dots,k_l;n}^{>0}$ as the subset of partial flags which can be represented by a totally positive $n\times n$ matrix, and defined the totally nonnegative part $\text{Fl}_{k_1,\dots,k_l;n}^{\ge 0}$ as the closure of $\text{Fl}_{k_1,\dots,k_l;n}^{>0}$. On the other …
We consider matrices whose elements enumerate weights of walks in planar directed weighted graphs (not necessarily acyclic). These matrices are totally nonnegative; more precisely, all their minors are formal power series in edge weights with nonnegative coefficients. A combinatorial explanation of this phenomenon involves loop-erased walks. Applications include total positivity of hitting matrices of Brownian motion in planar domains.
Cactus networks were introduced by Lam as a generalization of planar electrical networks. He defined a map from these networks to the Grassmannian Gr($n+1,2n$) and showed that the image of this map, $\mathcal X_n$ lies inside the totally nonnegative part of this Grassmannian. In this paper, we show that $\mathcal X_n$ is exactly the elements of Gr($n+1,2n$) that are both totally nonnegative and isotropic for a particular skew-symmetric bilinear form. For certain classes of cactus networks, we also explicitly describe how to turn response matrices and effective resistance matrices into points o…
By a theorem of A.Björner, for every interval $[u,v]$ in the Bruhat order of a Coxeter group $W$, there exists a stratified space whose strata are labeled by the elements of $[u,v]$, adjacency is described by the Bruhat order, and each closed stratum (resp., the boundary of each stratum) has the homology of a ball (resp., of a sphere). Answering a question posed by Björner, we suggest a natural geometric realization of these stratified spaces for a Weyl group $W$ of a semisimple Lie group $G$, and prove its validity in the case of the symmetric group. Our stratified spaces arise as links in th…
The totally nonnegative Grassmannian $\mathrm{Gr}(k,n)_{\geq0}$ is the subset of the real Grassmannian $\mathrm{Gr}(k,n)$ consisting of points with all nonnegative Plücker coordinates. The circular Bruhat order is a poset isomorphic to the face poset of A. Postnikov's (2005) positroid cell decomposition of $\mathrm{Gr}(k,n)_{\geq0}$. We provide a closed formula for the sum of its weighted chains in the spirit of J. Stembridge (2002).
