The totally nonnegative part of a partial flag variety G/P is known to have a decomposition into semi-algebraic cells. We show that the closure of a cell is again a union of cells and give a combinatorial description of the closure relations. The totally nonnegative cells are defined by intersecting the totally nonnegative part with a certain stratification of G/P defined by Lusztig. We also verify the same closure relations for these strata.
The totally nonnegative part of a partial flag variety G/P has been shown by the first author to be a union of semi-algebraic cells. Moreover she showed that the closure of a cell is the union of smaller cells. In this note we provide glueing maps for each of the cells to prove that the totally nonnegative part of G/P is a CW complex. This generalizes a result of Postnikov, Speyer and the second author for Grassmannians.
We explain how A. Givental's mirror symmetric family to the type A flag variety and its proposed generalization to partial flag varieties by Batyrev, Ciocan-Fontanine, Kim and van Straten relate to the Peterson variety Y in SL_n/B. We then use this theory to describe the totally nonnegative part of Y.
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…
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 $Δ_{2,n}$.
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.
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…
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 …
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.
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…
We consider homogeneous multiaffine polynomials whose coefficients are the Plücker coordinates of a point $V$ of the Grassmannian. We show that such a polynomial is stable (with respect to the upper half plane) if and only if $V$ is in the totally nonnegative part of the Grassmannian. To prove this, we consider an action of matrices on multiaffine polynomials. We show that a matrix $A$ preserves stability of polynomials if and only if $A$ is totally nonnegative. The proofs are applications of classical theory of totally nonnegative matrices, and the generalized Pólya-Schur theory of Borcea and…
The Zariski closure of the boundary of the set of matrices of nonnegative rank at most 3 is reducible. We give a minimal generating set for the ideal of each irreducible component. In fact, this generating set is a Grobner basis with respect to the graded reverse lexicographic order. This solves a conjecture by Robeva, Sturmfels and the last author.
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, …
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…
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…
We define and study the totally nonnegative part of the Chow quotient of the Grassmannian, or more simply the nonnegative configuration space. This space has a natural stratification by positive Chow cells, and we show that nonnegative configuration space is homeomorphic to a polytope as a stratified space. We establish bijections between positive Chow cells and the following sets: (a) regular subdivisions of the hypersimplex into positroid polytopes, (b) the set of cones in the positive tropical Grassmannian, and (c) the set of cones in the positive Dressian. Our work is motivated by connecti…
