Combinatorial Formulas for Macdonald and Hall-Littlewood Polynomials of Types A and C. Extended Abstract

A 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 fillings of Young diagrams. Recently, Ram and Yip gave a formula for the Macdonald polynomials of arbitrary type in terms of the corresponding affine Weyl group. In this paper, we show that a Haglund-Haiman-Loehr type formula follows naturally from the more general Ram-Yip formula, via compression. Then we extend this approach to the Hall-Littlewood polynomials of type C, which are specializations of the corresponding Macdonald polynomials at q=0. We note that no analog of the Haglund-Haiman-Loehr formula exists beyond type A, so our work is a first step towards finding such a formula

Richard Stanley through a crystal lens and from a random angle

We review Stanley's seminal work on the number of reduced words of the longest element of the symmetric group and his Stanley symmetric functions. We shed new light on this by giving a crystal theoretic interpretation in terms of decreasing factorizations of permutations. Whereas crystal operators on tableaux are coplactic operators, the crystal operators on decreasing factorization intertwine with the Edelman-Greene insertion. We also view this from a random perspective and study a Markov chain on reduced words of the longest element in a finite Coxeter group, in particular the symmetric group, and mention a generalization to a poset setting.Comment: 11 pages; 3 figures; v2 updated references and added discussion on Coxeter-Knuth grap

Tridiagonalized GUE matrices are a matrix model for labeled mobiles

It is well-known that the number of planar maps with prescribed vertex degree distribution and suitable labeling can be represented as the leading coefficient of the $\frac{1}{N}$-expansion of a joint cumulant of traces of powers of an $N$-by-$N$ GUE matrix. Here we undertake the calculation of this leading coefficient in a different way. Firstly, we tridiagonalize the GUE matrix in the manner of Trotter and Dumitriu-Edelman and then alter it by conjugation to make the subdiagonal identically equal to $1$. Secondly, we apply the cluster expansion technique (specifically, the Brydges-Kennedy-Abdesselam-Rivasseau formula) from rigorous statistical mechanics. Thirdly, by sorting through the terms of the expansion thus generated we arrive at an alternate interpretation for the leading coefficient related to factorizations of the long cycle $(12\cdots n)\in S_n$. Finally, we reconcile the group-theoretical objects emerging from our calculation with the labeled mobiles of Bouttier-Di Francesco-Guitter.Comment: 42 pages, LaTeX, 17 figures. The present paper completely supercedes arXiv1203.3185 in terms of methods but addresses a different proble

Schur-Weyl duality and the heat kernel measure on the unitary group

We establish a convergent power series expansion for the expectation of a product of traces of powers of a random unitary matrix under the heat kernel measure. These expectations turn out to be the generating series of certain paths in the Cayley graph of the symmetric group. We then compute the asymptotic distribution of a random unitary matrix under the heat kernel measure on the unitary group U(N) as N tends to infinity, and prove a result of asymptotic freeness result for independent large unitary matrices, thus recovering results obtained previously by Xu and Biane. We give an interpretation of our main expansion in terms of random ramified coverings of a disk. Our approach is based on the Schur-Weyl duality and we extend some of our results to the orthogonal and symplectic cases