The totally nonnegative Grassmannian is a ball

We prove that three spaces of importance in topological combinatorics are homeomorphic to closed balls: the totally nonnegative Grassmannian, the compactification of the space of electrical networks, and the cyclically symmetric amplituhedron.Comment: 19 pages. v2: Exposition improved in many place

Mask formulas for cograssmannian Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials

We give two contructions of sets of masks on cograssmannian permutations that can be used in Deodhar's formula for Kazhdan-Lusztig basis elements of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra. The constructions are respectively based on a formula of Lascoux-Schutzenberger and its geometric interpretation by Zelevinsky. The first construction relies on a basis of the Hecke algebra constructed from principal lower order ideals in Bruhat order and a translation of this basis into sets of masks. The second construction relies on an interpretation of masks as cells of the Bott-Samelson resolution. These constructions give distinct answers to a question of Deodhar.Comment: 43 page

The twist for positroids

International audienceThere are two reasonable ways to put a cluster structure on a positroid variety. In one, the initial seed is a set of Plu ̈cker coordinates. In the other, the initial seed consists of certain monomials in the edge weights of a plabic graph. We will describe an automorphism of the positroid variety, the twist, which takes one to the other. For the big positroid cell, this was already done by Marsh and Scott; we generalize their results to all positroid varieties. This also provides an inversion of the boundary measurement map which is more general than Talaska's, in that it works for all reduced plabic graphs rather than just Le-diagrams. This is the analogue for positroid varieties of the twist map of Berenstein, Fomin and Zelevinsky for double Bruhat cells. Our construction involved the combinatorics of dimer configurations on bipartite planar graphs

Mini-Workshop: Non-Negativity is a Quantum Phenomenon

In recent publications, the same combinatorial description has arisen for three separate objects of interest: non-negative cells in the real grassmannian (Postnikov, Williams); torus orbits of symplectic leaves in the classical grassmannian (Brown, Goodearl and Yakimov); and, torus invariant prime ideals in the quantum grassmannian (Launois, Lenagan and Rigal). The aim of this meeting was to explore the reasons for this coincidence in matrices and the grassmannian in particular, and to explore similar ideas in more general settings