We introduce and study a family of inhomogeneous symmetric functions which we call the Frobenius-Schur functions. These functions are indexed by partitions and differ from the conventional Schur functions in lower terms only.
Our interest in these new functions comes from the fact that they provide an explicit expression for the dimension of a skew Young diagram in terms of the Frobenius coordinates. This is important for the asymptotic theory of the characters of the symmetric groups.
Our main result is a surprisingly simple determinantal expression of the Frobenius-Schur functions in terms of the conventional Schur functions. Other results include certain generating series, the Giambelli formula, vanishing properties and interpolation, a combinatorial formula (representation in terms of tableaux), and a Sergeev-Pragacz-type formula.
Actually, we deal with a wider class of inhomogeneous symmetric functions which we call multiparameter Schur functions. These functions depend on an arbitrary doubly infinite sequence of parameters and interpolate between the Frobenius--Schur functions and the conventional Schur functions.
This paper contains the statements of the results and the main formulas. Proofs will be given in an expanded version of the paper which will be posted in the arXiv.
The present paper is a detailed version of math/0003031. We introduce and study a new basis in the algebra of symmetric functions. The elements of this basis are called the Frobenius-Schur functions (FS-functions, for short). Our main motivation for studying the FS-functions is the fact that they enter a formula expressing the combinatorial dimension of a skew Young diagram in terms of the Frobenius coordinates. This formula plays a key role in the asymptotic character theory of the symmetric groups. The FS-functions are inhomogeneous, and their top homogeneous components coincide with the con…
Around about 1917, Issai Schur rediscovered the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, and proved a system of polynomial identities that imply them. Schur wrote that Georg Frobenius (his former advisor) had shown him a simple, direct proof of these polynomial identities. Schur did not see fit to reveal Frobenius's proof, preferring his own rather complicated proof. But it is easy enough to guess what this `simple, direct' proof must have been. As Frobenius died in 1917, we may call this `Frobenius's last proof'.
We use k-Schur functions to get the minimal boundary of the k-bounded partition poset. This permits to describe the central random walks on affine Grassmannian elements of type A and yields a polynomial expression for their drift. We also recover Rietsch's parametriza-tion of totally nonnegative unitriangular Toeplitz matrices without using quantum cohomology of flag varieties. All the homeomorphisms we define can moreover be made explicit by using the combinatorics of k-Schur functions and elementary computations based on Perron-Frobenius theorem.
The aim of this paper is to describe structural properties of spaces of diagonal rectangular harmonic polynomials in several sets (say $k$) of $n$ variables, both as $GL_k$-modules and $S_n$-modules. We construct explicit such modules associated to any hook shape partitions. For the two sets of variables case, we conjecture that the associated graded Frobenius characteristic corresponds to the effect of the operator Nabla on the corresponding hook-indexed Schur function, up to a usual renormalization. We prove identities that give indirect support to this conjecture, and show that its restrict…
We present a Pfaffian identity involving elliptic functions, whose rational limit gives a generalization of Schur's Pfaffian identity for Pf ((x_j - x_i)/(x_j + x_i)). This identity is regarded as a Pfaffian counterpart of Frobenius identity, which is an elliptic generalization of Cauchy's determinant identity for det (1/ (x_i + x_j)).
The Kronecker product of two Schur functions $s_μ$ and $s_ν$, denoted by $s_μ*s_ν$, is the Frobenius characteristic of the tensor product of the irreducible representations of the symmetric group corresponding to the partitions $μ$ and $ν$. The coefficient of $s_λ$ in this product is denoted by $γ^λ_{μν}$, and corresponds to the multiplicity of the irreducible character $χ^λ$ in $χ^μχ^ν.$ We use Sergeev's Formula for a Schur function of a difference of two alphabets and the comultiplication expansion for $s_λ[XY]$ to find closed formulas for the Kronecker coefficients $γ^λ_{μν}$ when $λ$ is an…
In 1995, the first author introduced a multivariate generating function {$G$} that tracks the distribution of ascents and descents in labeled binary trees. In addition to proving that $G$ is symmetric, he conjectured that $G$ is Schur positive. We prove this conjecture by expanding $G$ positively in terms of ribbon Schur functions. We obtain this expansion using a weight-preserving bijection whose inverse is inspired by the Push-Glide algorithm of Préville-Ratelle and Viennot. In fact, this weight-preserving bijection allows us to establish a stronger version of the first author's conjecture s…
In the Hopf algebra of symmetric functions, Sym, the basis of Schur functions is distinguished since every Schur function is isomorphic to an irreducible character of a symmetric group under the Frobenius characteristic map. In this note we show that in the Hopf algebra of noncommutative symmetric functions, Nsym, of which Sym is a quotient, the recently discovered basis of noncommutative Schur functions exhibits that every noncommutative Schur function is isomorphic to a noncommutative irreducible character of a symmetric group when working in noncommutative character theory. We simultaneousl…
By computing Frobenius-Schur indicators of modules of certain weak Hopf algebras, we give a formula for the number of involutions in symmetric groups, which are contained in a given coset with respect to a given Young subgroup.
The representation theory of the symmetric groups is intimately related to geometry, algebraic combinatorics, and Lie theory. The spin representation theory of the symmetric groups was originally developed by Schur. In these lecture notes, we present a coherent account of the spin counterparts of several classical constructions such as the Frobenius characteristic map, Schur duality, the coinvariant algebra, Kostka polynomials, and Young's seminormal form.
We study the numbers of involutions and their relation to Frobenius-Schur indicators in the groups $\mathrm{SO}^{\pm}(n,q)$ and $Ω^{\pm}(n,q)$. Our point of view for this study comes from two motivations. The first is the conjecture that a finite simple group $G$ is strongly real (all elements are conjugate to their inverses by an involution) if and only if it is totally orthogonal (all Frobenius-Schur indicators are 1), and we are able to show this holds for all finite simple groups $G$ other than the groups $\mathrm{Sp}(2n,q)$ with $q$ even or $Ω^{\pm}(4m,q)$ with $q$ even. We prove computat…
If the moments of a probability measure on $\R$ are interpreted as a specialization of complete homogeneous symmetric functions, its free cumulants are, up to sign, the corresponding specializations of a sequence of Schur positive symmetric functions $(f_n)$. We prove that $(f_n)$ is the Frobenius characteristic of the natural permutation representation of $\SG_n$ on the set of prime parking functions. This observation leads us to the construction of a Hopf algebra of parking functions, which we study in some detail.
We apply crystal theory to affine Schubert calculus, Gromov-Witten invariants for the complete flag manifold, and the positroid stratification of the positive Grassmannian. We introduce operators on decompositions of elements in the type-$A$ affine Weyl group and produce a crystal reflecting the internal structure of the generalized Young modules whose Frobenius image is represented by stable Schubert polynomials. We apply the crystal framework to products of a Schur function with a $k$-Schur function, consequently proving that a subclass of 3-point Gromov-Witten invariants of complete flag va…
We introduce new families of cylindric symmetric functions as subcoalgebras in the ring of symmetric functions $Λ$ (viewed as a Hopf algebra) which have non-negative structure constants. Combinatorially these cylindric symmetric functions are defined as weighted sums over cylindric reverse plane partitions or - alternatively - in terms of sets of affine permutations. We relate their combinatorial definition to an algebraic construction in terms of the principal Heisenberg subalgebra of the affine Lie algebra $\mathfrak{\widehat{sl}}_n$ and a specialised cyclotomic Hecke algebra. Using Schur-We…
A special case of a fundamental result of Loewner and Horn [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 1969] says that given an integer $n \geq 1$, if the entrywise application of a smooth function $f : (0,\infty) \to \mathbb{R}$ preserves the set of $n \times n$ positive semidefinite matrices with positive entries, then $f$ and its first $n-1$ derivatives are non-negative on $(0,\infty)$. In a recent joint work with Belton-Guillot-Putinar [J. Eur. Math. Soc., in press], we proved a stronger version, and used it to strengthen the Schoenberg-Rudin characterization of dimension-free positivity preservers [Duke Mat…
Let R_n be the ring of coinvariants for the diagonal action of the symmetric group S_n. It is known that the character of R_n as a doubly-graded S_n module can be expressed using the Frobenius characteristic map as \nabla e_n, where e_n is the n-th elementary symmetric function, and \nabla is an operator from the theory of Macdonald polynomials. We conjecture a combinatorial formula for \nabla e_n and prove that it has many desirable properties which support our conjecture. In particular, we prove that our formula is a symmetric function (which is not obvious) and that it is Schur positive. Th…
