Stanley introduced expressions for the normalized characters of the symmetric group and stated some positivity conjectures for these expressions. Here, we give an affirmative partial answer to Stanley's positivity conjectures about the expressions using results on Kerov polynomials. In particular, we use new positivity results by Goulden and the present author. We shall see that the generating series $C(t)$ introduced by them is critical to our discussion.
The involution Stanley symmetric functions $\hat{F}_y$ are the stable limits of the analogues of Schubert polynomials for the orbits of the orthogonal group in the flag variety. These symmetric functions are also generating functions for involution words, and are indexed by the involutions in the symmetric group. By construction each $\hat{F}_y$ is a sum of Stanley symmetric functions and therefore Schur positive. We prove the stronger fact that these power series are Schur $P$-positive. We give an algorithm to efficiently compute the decomposition of $\hat{F}_y$ into Schur $P$-summands, and p…
The orbits of the symplectic group acting on the type A flag variety are indexed by the fixed-point-free involutions in a finite symmetric group. The cohomology classes of the closures of these orbits have polynomial representatives $\hat{\mathfrak{S}}^{\tt{FPF}}_z$ akin to Schubert polynomials. We show that the fixed-point-free involution Stanley symmetric functions $\hat{F}^{\tt{FPF}}_z$, which are stable limits of the polynomials $\hat{\mathfrak{S}}^{\tt{FPF}}_z$, are Schur $P$-positive. To do so, we construct an analogue of the Lascoux-Schützenberger tree, an algebraic recurrence that comp…
Stanley introduces polynomials which help evaluate symmetric group characters and conjectures that the coefficients of the polynomials are positive. Stanley later gives a conjectured combinatorial interpretation for the coefficients of the polynomials. Here, we prove the conjecture for the terms of highest degree.
We give a new formula for the irreducible spin characters of the symmetric groups. This formula is analogous to Stanley's character formula for the usual (linear) characters of the symmetric groups.
We study zonal characters which are defined as suitably normalized coefficients in the expansion of zonal polynomials in terms of power-sum symmetric functions. We show that the zonal characters, just like the characters of the symmetric groups, admit a nice combinatorial description in terms of Stanley's multirectangular coordinates of Young diagrams. We also study the analogue of Kerov polynomials, namely we express the zonal characters as polynomials in free cumulants and we give an explicit combinatorial interpretation of their coefficients. In this way, we prove two recent conjectures of …
We prove an upper bound for characters of the symmetric groups. Namely, we show that there exists a constant a>0 with a property that for every Young diagram λwith n boxes, r(λ) rows and c(λ) columns |Tr ρ^λ(π) / Tr ρ^λ(e)| < [a max(r(λ)/n, c(λ)/n,|π|/n) ]^{|π|}, where |π| is the minimal number of factors needed to write π\in S_n as a product of transpositions. We also give uniform estimates for the error term in the Vershik-Kerov's and Biane's character formulas and give a new formula for free cumulants of the transition measure.
Let G be a group of automorphisms of a ranked poset Q and let N_{k} denote the number of orbits on the elements of rank k in Q. What can be said about the N_{k} for standard posets, such as finite projective spaces or the Boolean lattice? We discuss the connection of this question to the representation theory of the group, and in particular to the inequalities of Livingstone-Wagner and Stanley. We show that these are special cases of more general inequalities which depend on the prime divisors of the group order. The new inequalities often yield stronger bounds depending on the order of the gr…
The characters of Kazhdan--Lusztig elements of the Hecke algebra over $S_n$ (and in particular, the chromatic symmetric function of indifference graphs) are completely encoded in the (intersection) cohomology of certain subvarieties of the flag variety. Considering the forgetful map to some partial flag variety, the decomposition theorem tells us that this cohomology splits as a sum of intersection cohomology groups with coefficients in some local systems of subvarieties of the partial flag variety. We prove that these local systems correspond to representations of subgroups of $S_n$. An expli…
Kerov's polynomials give irreducible character values in term of the free cumulants of the associated Young diagram. We prove in this article a positivity result on their coefficients, which extends a conjecture of S. Kerov. Our method, through decomposition of maps, gives a description of the coefficients of the k-th Kerov's polynomials using permutations in S(k). We also obtain explicit formulas or combinatorial interpretations for some coefficients. In particular, we are able to compute the subdominant term for character values on any fixed permutation (it was known for cycles).
Stanley symmetric functions are the stable limits of Schubert polynomials. In this paper, we show that, conversely, Schubert polynomials are Demazure truncations of Stanley symmetric functions. This parallels the relationship between Schur functions and Demazure characters for the general linear group. We establish this connection by imposing a Demazure crystal structure on key tableaux, recently introduced by the first author in connection with Demazure characters and Schubert polynomials, and linking this to the type A crystal structure on reduced word factorizations, recently introduced by …
Kerov polynomials express the normalized characters of irreducible representations of the symmetric group, evaluated on a cycle, as polynomials in the free cumulants of the associated Young diagram. We present two positivity conjectures for their coefficients. The latter are stronger than the positivity conjecture of Kerov-Biane, recently proved by Feray.
We give a direct proof for the positivity of Kirillov's character on the convolution algebra of smooth, compactly supported functions on a connected, simply connected nilpotent Lie group $G$. Then we use this positivity result to construct a representation of $G\times G$ and establish a $G\times G$-equivariant isometric isomorphism between our representation and the Hilbert--Schmidt operators on the underlying representation of $G$. In fact, we provide a more general framework in which we establish the positivity of Kirillov's character for coadjoint orbits of groups such as $\operatorname{SL}…
We show that the explicit formula of Stanley-Féray-Śniady for the characters of the symmetric group have a natural extension to the generalized characters. These are the spherical functions of the unbalanced Gel'fand pair $(S_n\times S_{n-1},\text{diag}S_{n-1})$.
Let $Q$ be an acyclic quiver and let $\mathcal A(Q)$ be the corresponding cluster algebra. Let $H$ be the path algebra of $Q$ over an algebraically closed field and let $M$ be an indecomposable regular $H$-module. We prove the positivity of the cluster characters associated to $M$ expressed in the initial seed of $\mathcal A(Q)$ when either $H$ is tame and $M$ is any regular $H$-module, or $H$ is wild and $M$ is a regular Schur module which is not quasi-simple.
We formulate a strong positivity conjecture on characters afforded by the Alvis-Curtis dual of the intersection cohomology of Deligne-Lusztig varieties. This conjecture provides a powerful tool to determine decomposition numbers of unipotent $\ell$-blocks of finite reductive groups.
