Young diagrams are ubiquitous in combinatorics and representation theory. Here we explain these diagrams, focusing on how they are used to classify representations of the symmetric groups $S_n$ and various "classical groups": famous groups of matrices such as the general linear group $\mathrm{GL}(n,\mathbb{C})$ consisting of all invertible $n \times n$ complex matrices, the special linear group $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{C})$ consisting of all $n \times n$ complex matrices with determinant 1, the group $\mathrm{U}(n)$ consisting of all unitary $n \times n$ matrices, and the special unitary group $\mathrm{SU}(n)$ consisting of all unitary $n \times n$ matrices with determinant 1. We also discuss representations of the full linear monoid consisting of all linear transformations of $\mathbb{C}^n$. These notes, based on the column This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, are made to accompany a series of lecture videos.
In this paper we compute the precise asymptotics of the variance of linear statistic of descents on a growing interval for Plancherel Young diagrams (following Vershik and Kerov, diagrams are considered rotated by $π/4$). We also give an example of a local configuration with linearly growing variance in a fixed regime and prove the central limit theorem for this configuration in the given regime.
We introduce a large class of random Young diagrams which can be regarded as a natural one-parameter deformation of some classical Young diagram ensembles; a deformation which is related to Jack polynomials and Jack characters. We show that each such a random Young diagram converges asymptotically to some limit shape and that the fluctuations around the limit are asymptotically Gaussian.
We study the class of Uglov bipartitions and prove a generalization of a conjecture by Dipper, James and Murphy. We give two consequences concerning the computation of canonical bases in affine type A and the description of decomposition matrices for Hecke algebras of type Bn in arbitrary characteristic.
We give a new simple description of the canonical bijection between the set of triangulations of n-gon and some set of Young diagrams. Using this description, we find flip transformations on this set of Young diagrams which correspond to the edges of the associahedron. This construction is generalized on the set of all Young diagrams and the corresponding infinite-dimensional associahedron is defined. We consider its relation to the properly defined infinite-type version of the cluster algebras of type A and check some properties of these algebras inherited from their finite-type counterparts.…
Applying the techniques of an earlier paper with Frenkel, we develop a geometric realization of spin representations and Clifford algebras. In doing so, we give an explicit parametrization of the irreducible components of Nakajima varieties of type D in terms of Young diagrams. We explicity compute the geometric action of the Lie algebra and are able to extend the geometric action to the entire Clifford algebra used in the classical construction of the spin representations.
We study asymptotics of reducible representations of the symmetric groups S_q for large q. We decompose such a representation as a sum of irreducible components (or, alternatively, Young diagrams) and we ask what is the character of a randomly chosen component (or, what is the shape of a randomly chosen Young diagram). Our main result is that for a large class of representations the fluctuations of characters (and fluctuations of the shape of the Young diagrams) are asymptotically Gaussian; in this way we generalize Kerov's central limit theorem. The considered class consists of representation…
We study asymptotics of an irreducible representation of the symmetric group S_n corresponding to a balanced Young diagram λ(a Young diagram with at most C\sqrt{n} rows and columns for some fixed constant C) in the limit as n tends to infinity. We show that there exists a constant D (which depends only on C) with a property that |χ^λ(π)| = | Tr ρ^λ(π)/Tr ρ^λ(e) | < [ D max(1,|π|^2/n) / \sqrt{n}} ]^{|π|}, where |π| denotes the length of a permutation (the minimal number of factors necessary to write πas a product of transpositions). Our main tool is an analogue of Frobenius character formula wh…
Classical Schur P-functions are the particular case of Hall-Littlewood polynomials when the parameter is equal to -1. We introduce factorial (interpolation) analogues of Schur P-functions. A dimension of a skew shifted Young diagram is the number of standard tableaux of the given shape. Also these numbers are equal up to simple factors to the decomposition coefficients of the restriction of an irreducible representation of a spin-symmetric group to a smaller spin-symmetric group. In terms of the factorial Schur P-functions we obtain an explicit formula for the dimension of a skew shifted Young…
The Yangian of the Lie algebra $gl_N$ has a distinguished family of irreducible finite-dimensional representations, called elementary representations. They are parametrized by pairs, consisting of a skew Young diagram and a complex number. Each of these representations has an explicit realization, it extends the classical realization of the irreducible polynomial representations of $gl_N$ by means of the Young symmetrizers. We explicitly construct analogues of these elementary representations for the twisted Yangian, which corresponds to the Lie algebra $so_N$. Our construction provides soluti…
We give a new simple characterization of the set of Kleshchev multipartitions, and more generally of the set of Uglov multipartitions. These combinatorial objects play an important role in various areas of representation theory of quantum groups, Hecke algebras or finite reductive groups. As a consequence, we obtain a proof of a generalization of a conjecture by Dipper, James and Murphy and a generalization of the LLT algorithm for arbitrary level.
The crystal bases are quite useful combinatorial tools to study the representations of quantized universal enveloping algebras $U_q(\mathfrak{g})$. The polyhedral realization for $B(\infty)$ is a combinatorial description of the crystal base, which is defined as an image of embedding $Ψ_ι:B(\infty)\hookrightarrow \mathbb{Z}^{\infty}_ι$, where $ι$ is an infinite sequence of indices and $\mathbb{Z}^{\infty}_ι$ is an infinite $\mathbb{Z}$-lattice with a crystal structure associated with $ι$. It is a natural problem to find an explicit form of the polyhedral realization ${\rm Im}(Ψ_ι)$. In this ar…
We study the tensor product $W$ of any number of "elementary" irreducible modules $V_1,...,V_k$ over the Yangian of the general linear Lie algebra. Each of these modules is determined by a skew Young diagram and a complex parameter. For any indices $i,j=1,...,k$ there is a canonical non-zero intertwining operator $A_{ij}$ between the tensor products $V_i\otimes V_j$ and $V_j\otimes V_i$. This operator is defined up to a scalar multipler. We show that the tensor product $W$ is irreducible, if and only if all operators $A_{ij}$ with $i<j$ are invertible. This implies that the Yangian module $W$ …
Consider random Young diagrams with a fixed number n of boxes, where the probability distribution on diagrams is determined by the Plancherel measure. That is, the weight of a diagram is proportional to the squared dimension of the corresponding irreducible representation of the symmetric group S_n. As n goes to infinity, the boundary of the (suitably scaled) random diagram concentrates near a curve Omega (Logan-Shepp 1977, Vershik-Kerov 1977). In 1993, Kerov announced a central limit theorem describing Gaussian fluctuations of random diagrams around the limit shape Omega. Here we propose a re…
In this paper, we study shifted Schur functions $S_μ^\star$, as well as a new family of shifted symmetric functions $\mathfrak{K}_μ$ linked to Kostka numbers. We prove that both are polynomials in multi-rectangular coordinates, with nonnegative coefficients when written in terms of falling factorials. We then propose a conjectural generalization to the Jack setting. This conjecture is a lifting of Knop and Sahi's positivity result for usual Jack polynomials and resembles recent conjectures of Lassalle. We prove our conjecture for one-part partitions.
Vershik and Kerov conjectured in 1985 that dimensions of irreducible representations of finite symmetric groups, after appropriate normalization, converge to a constant with respect to the Plancherel family of measures on the space of Young diagrams. The statement of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture can be seen as an analogue of the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman Theorem for the non-stationary Markov process of the growth of a Young diagram. The limiting constant is then interpreted as the entropy of the Plancherel measure. The main result of the paper is the proof of the Vershik-Kerov conjecture. The a…
We consider the decomposition into irreducible components of the external power $Λ^p(\mathbb{C}^m\otimes \mathbb{C}^n)$ regarded as a $\operatorname{GL}_m\times\operatorname{GL}_n$-module. Skew Howe duality implies that the Young diagrams from each pair $(λ,μ)$ which contributes to this decomposition turn out to be conjugate to each other, i.e.~$μ=λ'$. We show that the Young diagram $λ$ which corresponds to a randomly selected irreducible component $(λ,λ')$ has the same distribution as the Young diagram which consists of the boxes with entries $\leq p$ of a random Young tableau of rectangular …
We give a new (inductive) proof of the classical Frobenius--Young correspondence between irreducible complex representations of the symmetric group and Young diagrams, using the new approach, suggested in \cite{OV, VO}, to determining this correspondence. We also give linear relations between Kostka numbers that follow from the decomposition of the restrictions of induced representations to the previous symmetric subgroup. We consider a realization of representations induced from Young subgroups in polylinear forms and describe its relation to Specht modules.
We study root-theoretic Young diagrams to investigate the existence of a Lie-type uniform and nonnegative combinatorial rule for Schubert calculus. We provide formulas for (co)adjoint varieties of classical Lie type. This is a simplest case after the (co)minuscule family (where a rule has been proved by H.Thomas and the second author using work of R.Proctor). Our results build on earlier Pieri-type rules of P.Pragacz-J.Ratajski and of A.Buch-A.Kresch-H.Tamvakis. Specifically, our formula for OG(2,2n) is the first complete rule for a case where diagrams are non-planar. Yet the formulas possess …
A recent breakthrough in the theory of (type A) Macdonald polynomials is due to Haglund, Haiman and Loehr, who exhibited a combinatorial formula for these polynomials in terms of a pair of statistics on fillings of Young diagrams. The inversion statistic, which is the more intricate one, suffices for specializing a closely related formula to one for the type A Hall-Littlewood Q-polynomials (spherical functions on p-adic groups). An apparently unrelated development, at the level of arbitrary finite root systems, led to Schwer's formula (rephrased and rederived by Ram) for the Hall-Littlewood P-…
In continuation of our recent work arXiv:2006.07312, we classify the extremal traces on infinite diagram algebras that appear in the context of Schur-Weyl duality for Banica and Speicher's easy groups. We show that the branching graphs of these algebras describe walks on new variations of the Young graph which describe curious ways of growing Young diagrams. As a consequence, we prove that the extremal traces on generic rook-Brauer algebras are always extensions of extremal traces on the group algebra $\mathbb{C}[S_{\infty}]$ of the infinite symmetric group. Moreover, we conjecture that the sa…
We study the unitary representations of the non-compact real forms of the complex Lie superalgebra sl(n|m). Among them, only the real form su(p,q|m) (p+q=n) admits nontrivial unitary representations, and all such representations are of the highest-weight type (or the lowest-weight type). We extend the standard oscillator construction of the unitary representations of non-compact Lie superalgebras over standard Fock spaces to generalised Fock spaces which allows us to define the action of oscillator determinants raised to non-integer powers. We prove that the proposed construction yields all th…
We consider two partial orders on standard Young tableaux. The first one is induced from the weak right Bruhat order on symmetric group by Robinson-Schensted algorithm. The second one is induced from the order on Young diagrams by considering a Young tableau as a chain of Young diagrams. We show that these two orders of completely different nature coincide on the subset of Young tableaux with 2 columns or with 2 rows. This fact has very interesting geometric implications for orbital varieties of nilpotent order 2 in sl(n).
In this paper, we give a new realization of crystal bases for finite dimensional irreducible modules over classical Lie algebras. The basis vectors are parameterized by certain Young walls lying between highest weight and lowest weight vectors.
Permutations and associated algebras allow the construction of half and quarter BPS operators in maximally supersymmetric Yang Mills theory with $U(N)$, $SO(N)$ and $Sp(N) $ gauge groups. The construction leads to bases for the operators, labelled by Young diagrams and associated group theory data, which have been shown to be orthogonal under the inner product defined by the free field two-point functions. In this paper, we study in detail the orientifold projection map between the Young diagram basis for $U(N)$ theories and the Young diagram basis for $ SO(N)$ (and $ Sp(N)$) half-BPS operator…
We derive two multivariate generating functions for three-dimensional Young diagrams (also called plane partitions). The variables correspond to a colouring of the boxes according to a finite Abelian subgroup G of SO(3). We use the vertex operator methods of Okounkov--Reshetikhin--Vafa for the easy case G = Z/n; to handle the considerably more difficult case G=Z/2 x Z/2, we will also use a refinement of the author's recent q--enumeration of pyramid partitions. In the appendix, we relate the diagram generating functions to the Donaldson-Thomas partition functions of the orbifold C^3/G. We find …
We show that the order on probability measures, inherited from the dominance order on the Young diagrams, is preserved under natural maps reducing the number of boxes in a diagram by $1$. As a corollary we give a new proof of the Thoma theorem on the structure of characters of the infinite symmetric group. We present several conjectures generalizing our result. One of them (if it is true) would imply the Kerov's conjecture on the classification of all homomorphisms from the algebra of symmetric functions into $\mathbb R$ which are non-negative on Hall--Littlewood polynomials.
Free cumulants are nice and useful functionals of the shape of a Young diagram, in particular they give the asymptotics of normalized characters of symmetric groups S(n) in the limit n\to\infty. We give an explicit combinatorial formula for normalized characters of the symmetric groups in terms of free cumulants. We also express characters in terms of Frobenius coordinates. Our formulas involve counting certain factorizations of a given permutation. The main tool are Stanley polynomials which give values of characters on multirectangular Young diagrams. Résumé. Les cumulants libres sont des fo…
In this paper, we study relationships between the normalized characters of symmetric groups and the Boolean cumulants of Young diagrams. Specifically, we show that each normalized character is a polynomial of twisted Boolean cumulants with coefficients being non-negative integers, and conversely, that, when we expand a Boolean cumulant in terms of normalized characters, the coefficients are again non-negative integers. The main tool is Khovanov's Heisenberg category and the recently established connection of its center to the ring of functions on Young diagrams, which enables one to apply grap…
Let $G_M$ be one of the complex Lie groups $O_M$ and $Sp_M$. The irreducible finite-dimensional representations of the group $G_M$ are labeled by partitions $μ$ satisfying certain extra conditions. Let $U$ be the representation of $G_M$ corresponding to $μ$. Regard the direct product $G_N\times G_M$ as a subgroup of $G_{N+M}$. Let $V$ be the irreducible representation of $G_{N+M}$ corresponding to a partition $λ$. Consider the vector space $W=Hom_{G_M}(U,V)$. It comes with a natural action of the group $G_N$. Let $n$ be sum of parts of $λ$ less the sum of parts of $μ$. For any choice of a stan…
Let $GL_M$ be general linear Lie group over the complex field. The irreducible rational representations of the group $GL_M$ are labeled by pairs of partitions $μ$ and $\tildeμ$ such that the total number of non-zero parts of $μ$ and $\tildeμ$ does not exceed $M$. Let $U$ be the representation of $GL_M$ corresponding to such a pair. Regard the direct product $GL_N\times GL_M$ as a subgroup of $GL_{N+M}$. Let $V$ be the irreducible rational representation of the group $GL_{N+M}$ corresponding to a pair of partitions $λ$ and $\tildeλ$. Consider the vector space $W=Hom_{G_M}(U,V)$. It comes with a…
Consider the standard Poisson process in the first quadrant of the Euclidean plane, and for any point (u,v) of this quadrant take the Young diagram obtained by applying the Robinson-Schensted correspondence to the intersection of the Poisson point configuration with the rectangle with vertices (0,0), (u,0), (u,v), (0,v). It is known that the distribution of the random Young diagram thus obtained is the poissonized Plancherel measure with parameter uv. We show that for (u,v) moving along any southeast-directed curve in the quadrant, these Young diagrams form a Markov chain with continuous time.…
We calculate the Fourier-Deligne transform of the IC extension to ${\C}^{n+1}$ of the local system ${\mathcal L}_Λ$ on the cone over $\Conf_n(¶^1)$ associated to a representation $Λ$ of $S_n$, where the length $n-k$ of the first row of the Young diagram of $Λ$ is at least $\frac{|Λ|-1}{2}$. The answer is the IC extension to the dual vector space ${\C}^{n+1}$ of the local system ${\mathcal R}_λ$ on the cone over the $k$-th secant variety of the rational normal curve in $¶^n$, where ${\mathcal R}_λ$ corresponds to the representation $λ$ of $S_k$, the Young diagram of which is obtained from the Y…
In $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM with $U(N)$ gauge symmetry, the multiplicity of half-BPS states with fixed dimension can be labelled by Young diagrams and can be distinguished using conserved charges corresponding to Casimirs of $U(N)$. The information theoretic study of LLM geometries and superstars in the dual $AdS_5 \times S^5$ background has raised a number of questions about the distinguishability of Young diagrams when a finite set of Casimirs are known. Using Schur-Weyl duality relations between unitary groups and symmetric groups, these questions translate into structural questions about the ce…
