Asymptotics for random walks in alcoves of affine Weyl groups
Christian Krattenthaler
备注：
72 pages, AmS-LaTeX; major revision: there are now also theorems on the asymptotic enumeration with non-fixed end points in types B and D; a flaw in the statement and proof of Lemma A has been corrected
Asymptotic results are derived for the number of random walks in alcoves of affine Weyl groups (which are certain regions in $n$-dimensional Euclidean space bounded by hyperplanes), thus solving problems posed by Grabiner [J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 97 (2002), 285-306]. These results include asymptotic expressions for the number of vicious walkers on a circle, and as well for the number of vicious walkers in an interval. The proofs depart from the exact results of Grabiner [loc. cit.], and require as diverse means as results from symmetric function theory and the saddle point method, among others.
We use a reflection argument, introduced by Gessel and Zeilberger, to count the number of k-step walks between two points which stay within a chamber of a Weyl group. We apply this technique to walks in the alcoves of the classical affine Weyl groups. In all cases, we get determinant formulas for the number of k-step walks. One important example is the region m>x_1>x_2>...>x_n>0, which is a rescaled alcove of the affine Weyl group C_n. If each coordinate is considered to be an independent particle, this models n non-colliding random walks on the interval (0,m). Another case models n non-collid…
Classical local Weyl modules for a simple Lie algebra are labeled by dominant weights. We generalize the definition to the case of arbitrary weights and study the properties of the generalized modules. We prove that the representation theory of the generalized Weyl modules can be described in terms of the alcove paths and the quantum Bruhat graph. We make use of the Orr-Shimozono formula in order to prove that the $t=\infty$ specializations of the nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials are equal to the characters of certain generalized Weyl modules.
This is the second of two papers where we study polytopes arising from affine Coxeter arrangements. Our results include a formula for their volumes, and also compatible definitions of hypersimplices, descent numbers and major index for all Weyl groups. We give a q-analogue of Weyl's formula for the order of the Weyl group. For A_n, C_n and D_4, we give a Grobner basis which induces the triangulation of alcoved polytopes.
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.
For a complex simple Lie algebra, the dimension $K_{λμ}$ of the $μ$ weight space of a finite dimensional representation of highest weight $λ$ is the same as the number of Littelmann paths of type $λ$ and weight $μ$. In this paper we give an explicit construction of a path of type $λ$ and weight $μ$ whenever $K_{λμ}\ne 0$. This construction has additional consequences, it produces an explicit point in the building which chamber retracts to $λ$ and sector retracts to $μ$, and an explicit point of the affine Grassmannian in the corresponding Mirković-Vilonen intersection. In an appendix we discus…
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-…
This paper makes precise the close connection between the affine Hecke algebra, the path model, and the theory of crystals. Section 2 is a basic pictorial exposition of Weyl groups and affine Weyl groups and Section 5 is an exposition of the theory of (a) symmetric functions, (b) crystals and (c) the path model. Sections 3 and 4 give an exposition of the affine Hecke algebra and recent results regarding the combinatorics of spherical functions on p-adic groups (Hall-Littlewood polynomials). The $q$-analogue of the theory of crystals developed in Section 4 specializes to the path model version …
We study in detail the so-called looping case of Mozes's game of numbers, which concerns the (finite) orbits in the reflection representation of affine Weyl groups situated on the boundary of the Tits cone. We give a simple proof that all configurations in the orbit are obtainable from each other by playing the numbers game, and give a strategy for going from one configuration to another. The strategy gives rise to a partition of the finite Weyl group into finitely many graded posets, one for each extending vertex of the associated extended Dynkin diagram. These are selfdual and mutually isomo…
The special fiber of the local model of a PEL Shimura variety with Iwahori-type level structure admits a cellular decomposition. The set of strata is in a natural way a finite subset of the affine Weyl group determined by the Shimura data. In this paper, we generalize and give a new proof of a theorem of Kottwitz and Rapoport concerning the description of this set for the case of linear and symplectic groups. For higher rank groups not of type A_n, we produce counterexamples showing the situation is not as nice in general. Also, we recover a theorem of Deodhar characterizing the Bruhat order o…
Let G be a reductive group over the field F=k((t)), where k is an algebraic closure of a finite field, and let W be the (extended) affine Weyl group of G. The associated affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties $X_x(b)$, which are indexed by elements b in G(F) and x in W, were introduced by Rapoport. Basic questions about the varieties $X_x(b)$ which have remained largely open include when they are nonempty, and if nonempty, their dimension. We use techniques inspired by geometric group theory and representation theory to address these questions in the case that b is a pure translation, and so prove m…
In this paper we use the combinatorics of alcove walks to give a uniform combinatorial formula for Macdonald polynomials for all Lie types. These formulas are generalizations of the formulas of Haglund-Haiman-Loehr for Macdonald polynoimals of type GL(n). At q=0 these formulas specialize to the formula of Schwer for the Macdonald spherical function in terms of positively folded alcove walks and at q=t=0 these formulas specialize to the formula for the Weyl character in terms of the Littelmann path model (in the positively folded gallery form of Gaussent-Littelmann).
The Littelmann path moel gives a realization of the crystals of integrable representations of symmetrizable Kac-Moody Lie algebras. Recent work of Gaussent-Littelmann and others has demonstrated a connection between this model and the geometry of the loop Grassmannian. The alcove walk model is a version of the path model which is intimately connected to the combinatorics of the affine Hecke algebra. In this paper we define a refined alcove walk model which encodes the points of the affine flag variety. We show that this combinatorial indexing naturally indexes the "cells" in generalized Mirkov…
Sahi, Stokman, and Venkateswaran have constructed, for each positive integer $n$, a family of Laurent polynomials depending on parameters $q$ and $k$ (in addition to $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ "metaplectic parameters"), such that the $n=1$ case recovers the nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials and the $q\rightarrow\infty$ limit yields metaplectic Iwahori-Whittaker functions with arbitrary Gauss sum parameters. In this paper, we study these new polynomials, which we call SSV polynomials, in the case of $GL_r$. We apply a result of Ram and Yip in order to give a combinatorial formula for the SSV polynom…
We consider ad-nilpotent ideals of a Borel subalgebra of a simple Lie algebra. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, we study the ad-nilpotent ideals lying inside the Heisenberg ideal. The Heisenberg ideal is the nilpotent radical of the centralizer of the highest root vector. Second, we study the ideals having the property that the corresponding domain of the Shi arrangement consists of a single alcove. Such ideals (and the corresponding elements of the affine Weyl group) are called minimax.
Let $W$ be an irreducible Weyl group and $W_a$ its affine Weyl group. In this article we show that there exists a bijection between $W_a$ and the integral points of an affine variety, denoted $\widehat{X}_{W_a}$, which we call the Shi variety of $W_a$. In order to do so, we use Jian-Yi Shi's characterization of alcoves in affine Weyl groups. We then study this variety further. We highlight combinatorial properties of the irreducible components of $\widehat{X}_{W_a}$ and we show how they are related to a fundamental parallelepiped $P_{\mathcal{H}}$.
Affine Weyl groups and their parabolic quotients are used extensively as indexing sets for objects in combinatorics, representation theory, algebraic geometry, and number theory. Moreover, in the classical Lie types we can conveniently realize the elements of these quotients via intuitive geometric and combinatorial models such as abaci, alcoves, coroot lattice points, core partitions, and bounded partitions. Berg, Jones, and Vazirani described a bijection between n-cores with first part equal to k and (n-1)-cores with first part less than or equal to k, and they interpret this bijection in te…
Let $W$ be a finite Weyl group and $\widetilde W$ the corresponding affine Weyl group. A random element of $\widetilde W$ can be obtained as a reduced random walk on the alcoves of $\widetilde W$. By a theorem of Lam (Ann. Prob. 2015), such a walk almost surely approaches one of $|W|$ many directions. We compute these directions when $W$ is $B_n$, $C_n$ and $D_n$ and the random walk is weighted by Kac and dual Kac labels. This settles Lam's questions for types $B$ and $C$ in the affirmative and for type $D$ in the negative. The main tool is a combinatorial two row model for a totally asymmetri…
The paper compares (and reproves) the alcove walk and the nonattacking fillings formulas for type $GL_n$ Macdonald polynomials which were given in Haglund-Haiman-Loehr arXiv:math.CO/0601693, Alexandersson arXiv:1602.05153 and Ram-Yip arXiv:0803.1146. The "compression" relating the two formulas in this paper is the same as that of Lenart arXiv:0804.4716. We have reformulated it so that it holds without conditions and so that the proofs of the alcove walk formula and the nonattacking fillings formula are parallel. This reformulation highlights the role of the double affine Hecke algebra and Cher…
Affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties can be thought of as affine analogs of classical Deligne-Lusztig varieties, or Frobenius-twisted analogs of Schubert varieties. We provide a method for proving a non-emptiness statement for affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties inside the affine flag variety associated to affine Weyl group elements satisfying a certain length additivity hypothesis. In particular, we prove that non-emptiness holds whenever it is conjectured to do so for alcoves in the shrunken dominant Weyl chamber, providing a partial converse to the emptiness results of Goertz, Haines, Kottwitz, an…
We study lattice walks in a Weyl chamber of type A with fixed or free end points. For lattice walk models with zero drift that may be counted by means of a reflection argument, we determine asymptotics for the number of such walks as their length tends to infinity. These models are equivalent to the lock step model and the random turns model of vicious walkers. As special cases, our main results include various asymptotic formulas found in the literature.
In the study of lattice walks there are several examples of enumerative equivalences which amount to a trade-off between domain and endpoint constraints. We present a family of such bijections for simple walks in Weyl chambers which use arc diagrams in a natural way. One consequence is a set of new bijections for standard Young tableaux of bounded height. A modification of the argument in two dimensions yields a bijection between Baxter permutations and walks ending on an axis, answering a recent question of Burrill et al. (2016). Some of our arguments (and related results) are proved using Sc…
We give an explicit formula for the probability that the convex hull of an $n$-step random walk in $R^d$ does not contain the origin, under the assumption that the distribution of increments of the walk is centrally symmetric and puts no mass on affine hyperplanes. This extends the formula by Sparre Andersen (1949) for the probability that such random walk in dimension one stays positive. Our result is distribution-free, that is, the probability does not depend on the distribution of increments. This probabilistic problem is shown to be equivalent to either of the two geometric ones: 1) Find t…
We consider lattice walks in $\R^k$ confined to the region $0<x_1<x_2...<x_k$ with fixed (but arbitrary) starting and end points. The walks are required to be "reflectable", that is, we assume that the number of paths can be counted using the reflection principle. The main results are asymptotic formulas for the total number of walks of length $n$ with either a fixed or a free end point for a general class of walks as $n$ tends to infinity. As applications, we find the asymptotics for the number of $k$-non-crossing tangled diagrams on the set $\{1,2,...,n\}$ as $n$ tends to infinity, and asymp…
Gessel and Zeilberger generalized the reflection principle to handle walks confined to Weyl chambers, under some restrictions on the allowable steps. For those models that are invariant under the Weyl group action, they express the counting function for the walks with fixed starting and endpoint as a constant term in the Taylor series expansion of a rational function. Here, we focus on the simplest case, the Weyl groups $A_1^d$, which correspond to walks in the first orthant $\mathbb{N}^d$ taking steps from a subset of $\{\pm1, 0\}^d$ which is invariant under reflection across any axis. The pr…
Random paths are time continuous interpolations of random walks. By using Littelmann path model, we associate to each irreducible highest weight module of a Kac Moody algebra g a random path W. Under suitable hypotheses, we make explicit the probability of the event E: W never exits the Weyl chamber of g. We then give the law of the random walk defined by W conditioned by the event E and proves this law can be recovered by applying to W the generalized Pitmann transform introduced by Biane, Bougerol and O'Connell. This generalizes the main results of [10] and [16] to Kac Moody root systems and…
Let $W$ be a finite Weyl group and ${\hat{W}}$ be the corresponding affine Weyl group. We show that a large element in ${\hat{W}}$, randomly generated by (reduced) multiplication by simple generators, almost surely has one of $|W|$-specific shapes. Equivalently, a reduced random walk in the regions of the affine Coxeter arrangement asymptotically approaches one of $|W|$-many directions. The coordinates of this direction, together with the probabilities of each direction can be calculated via a Markov chain on $W$. Our results, applied to type $\tilde{A}_{n-1}$, show that a large random $n$-cor…
In [O'Connell and Yor (2002)] a path-transformation G was introduced with the property that, for X belonging to a certain class of random walks on the integer lattice, the transformed walk G(X) has the same law as that of the original walk conditioned never to exit a type-A Weyl chamber. In this paper, we show that G is closely related to the Robinson-Schensted algorithm, and use this connection to give a new proof of the above representation theorem. The new proof is valid for a larger class of random walks and yields additional information about the joint law of X and G(X). The corresponding…
For a reductive group $G$ over a non-Archimedean local field (e.g $GL_n( \mathbb{Q}_p )$ ), Jacquet's Whittaker function is essentially proportional to a character of an irreducible representation of the Langlands dual group $G^\vee( \mathbb{C} )$ ( a Schur function if $G = GL_n( \mathbb{Q}_p )$). We propose a probabilistic approach to this claim, known as the Shintani-Casselman-Shalika formula, when the group $G$ has at least one minuscule cocharacter in the coweight lattice. Our presentation goes along the following lines. Thanks to a minuscule random walk $W^{(z)}$ on the coweight lattice a…
An ordinal pattern for a finite sequence of real numbers is a permutation that records the relative positions in the sequence. For random walks with steps drawn uniformly from $[-1,1]$, we show an ordinal pattern occurs with probability $\frac{|[1,w]|}{2^n n!}$, where $[1,w]$ is a weak order interval in the affine Weyl group $\widetilde{A}_n$. For random walks with steps drawn from a symmetric Laplace distribution, the probability is $\frac{1}{2^n \prod_{j=1}^n \mathrm{lev}(π)_j}$, where $\mathrm{lev}(π)_j$ measures how often $j$ occurs between consecutive values in $π$. Permutations whose con…
Consider a random walk $S_i= ξ_1+\ldots+ξ_i$, $i\in\mathbb N$, whose increments $ξ_1,ξ_2,\ldots$ are independent identically distributed random vectors in $\mathbb R^d$ such that $ξ_1$ has the same law as $-ξ_1$ and $\mathbb P[ξ_1\in H] = 0$ for every affine hyperplane $H\subset \mathbb R^d$. Our main result is the distribution-free formula $$ \mathbb E \left[\sum_{1\leq i_1 < \ldots < i_k\leq n} 1_{\{0\notin \text{conv}(S_{i_1},\ldots, S_{i_k})\}}\right] = 2 \binom n k \frac {B(k, d-1) + B(k, d-3) +\ldots} {2^k k!}, $$ where the $B(k,j)$'s are defined by their generating function $$ (t+1) (t+…
Given a module $M$ for the algebra $\mathcal{D}_{\mathtt{q}}(G)$ of quantum differential operators on $G$, and a positive integer $n$, we may equip the space $F_n^G(M)$ of invariant tensors in $V^{\otimes n}\otimes M$, with an action of the double affine Hecke algebra of type $A_{n-1}$. Here $G= SL_N$ or $GL_N$, and $V$ is the $N$-dimensional defining representation of $G$. In this paper we take $M$ to be the basic $\mathcal{D}_{\mathtt{q}}(G)$-module, i.e. the quantized coordinate algebra $M= \mathcal{O}_{\mathtt{q}}(G)$. We describe a weight basis for $F_n^G(\mathcal{O}_{\mathtt{q}}(G))$ com…
Random walk on the chambers of hyperplanes arrangements is used to define a family of card shuffling measures $H_{W,x}$ for a finite Coxeter group W and real $x \neq 0$. By algebraic group theory, there is a map from the semisimple orbits of the adjoint action of a finite group of Lie type on its Lie algebra to the conjugacy classes of the Weyl group. Choosing such a semisimple orbit uniformly at random thereby induces a probability measure on the conjugacy classes of the Weyl group. For types A, B, and the identity conjugacy class of W for all types, it is proved that for q very good, this me…
Let $G$ be a complex semisimple simply connected linear algebraic group. Let $λ$ be a dominant weight for $G$ and $\mathcal{I} = (i_1, i_2, \ldots, i_n)$ a word decomposition for an element $w = s_{i_1} s_{i_2} \cdots s_{i_n}$ of the Weyl group of $G$, where the $s_i$ are the simple reflections. In the 1990s, Grossberg and Karshon introduced a virtual lattice polytope associated to $λ$ and $\mathcal{I}$, which they called a twisted cube, whose lattice points encode (counted with sign according to a density function) characters of representations of $G$. In recent work, the first author and Jih…
