No Arabic abstract
The operator nabla, introduced by Garsia and the author, plays a crucial role in many aspect of the study of diagonal harmonics. Besides giving several new formulas involving this operator, we show how one is lead to representation theoretic explanations for conjectures about the effect of this operator on Schur functions.
We present an LLT-type formula for a general power of the nabla operator applied to the Cauchy product for the modified Macdonald polynomials, and use it to deduce a new proof of the generalized shuffle theorem describing $ abla^k e_n$, and the Elias-Hogancamp formula for $( abla^k p_1^n,e_n)$ as corollaries. We give a direct proof of the theorem by verifying that the LLT expansion satisfies the defining properties of $ abla^k$, such as triangularity in the dominance order, as well as a geometric proof based on a method for counting bundles on $mathbb{P}^1$ due to the second author. These formulas are related to an affine paving of the type A unramified affine Springer fiber studied by Goresky, Kottwitz, and MacPherson, and also to Stanleys chromatic symmetric functions.
Given a hypergraph $H$ and a weight function $w: V rightarrow {1, dots, M}$ on its vertices, we say that $w$ is isolating if there is exactly one edge of minimum weight $w(e) = sum_{i in e} w(i)$. The Isolation Lemma is a combinatorial principle introduced in Mulmuley et. al (1987) which gives a lower bound on the number of isolating weight functions. Mulmuley used this as the basis of a parallel algorithm for finding perfect graph matchings. It has a number of other applications to parallel algorithms and to reductions of general search problems to unique search problems (in which there are one or zero solutions). The original bound given by Mulmuley et al. was recently improved by Ta-Shma (2015). In this paper, we show improved lower bounds on the number of isolating weight functions, and we conjecture that the extremal case is when $H$ consists of $n$ singleton edges. When $M gg n$ our improved bound matches this extremal case asymptotically. We are able to show that this conjecture holds in a number of special cases: when $H$ is a linear hypergraph or is 1-degenerate, or when $M = 2$. We also show that it holds asymptotically when $M gg n gg 1$.
We conjecture a combinatorial formula for the monomial expansion of the image of any Schur function under the Bergeron-Garsia nabla operator. The formula involves nested labeled Dyck paths weighted by area and a suitable diagonal inversion statistic. Our model includes as special cases many previous conjectures connecting the nabla operator to quantum lattice paths. The combinatorics of the inverse Kostka matrix leads to an elementary proof of our proposed formula when q=1. We also outline a possible approach for proving all the extant nabla conjectures that reduces everything to the construction of sign-reversing involutions on explicit collections of signed, weighted objects.
In this paper, we begin with the Lehman-Walsh formula counting one-face maps and construct two involutions on pairs of permutations to obtain a new formula for the number $A(n,g)$ of one-face maps of genus $g$. Our new formula is in the form of a convolution of the Stirling numbers of the first kind which immediately implies a formula for the generating function $A_n(x)=sum_{ggeq 0}A(n,g)x^{n+1-2g}$ other than the well-known Harer-Zagier formula. By reformulating our expression for $A_n(x)$ in terms of the backward shift operator $E: f(x)rightarrow f(x-1)$ and proving a property satisfied by polynomials of the form $p(E)f(x)$, we easily establish the recursion obtained by Chapuy for $A(n,g)$. Moreover, we give a simple combinatorial interpretation for the Harer-Zagier recurrence.
In a 2016 ArXiv posting F. Bergeron listed a variety of symmetric functions $G[X;q]$ with the property that $G[X;1+q]$ is $e$-positive. A large subvariety of his examples could be explained by the conjecture that the Dyck path LLT polynomials exhibit the same phenomenon. In this paper we list the results of computer explorations which suggest that other examples exhibit the same phenomenon. We prove two of the resulting conjectures and propose algorithms that would prove several of our conjectures. In writing this paper we have learned that similar findings have been independently discovered by Per Alexandersson.