Connections between conjectures of Alon-Tarsi, Hadamard-Howe, and integrals over the special unitary group

We show the Alon-Tarsi conjecture on Latin squares is equivalent to a very special case of a conjecture made independently by Hadamard and Howe, and to the non-vanishing of some interesting integrals over SU(n). Our investigations were motivated by geometric complexity theory.Comment: 7 page

Stability of the Levi-Civita tensors and an Alon–Tarsi type theorem

We show that the Levi-Civita tensors are semistable in the sense of Geometric Invariant Theory, which is equivalent to an analogue of the Alon–Tarsi conjecture on Latin squares. The proof uses the connection of Tao’s slice rank with semistable tensors. We also show an application to an asymptotic saturation-type version of Rota’s basis conjecture

There are asymptotically the same number of Latin squares of each parity

A Latin square is reduced if its first row and column are in natural order. For Latin squares of a particular order n there are four possible different parities. We confirm a conjecture of Stones and Wanless by showing asymptotic equality between the numbers of reduced Latin squares of each possible parity as the order n → ∞

Implementing Geometric Complexity Theory: On the Separation of Orbit Closures via Symmetries

Understanding the difference between group orbits and their closures is a key difficulty in geometric complexity theory (GCT): While the GCT program is set up to separate certain orbit closures, many beautiful mathematical properties are only known for the group orbits, in particular close relations with symmetry groups and invariant spaces, while the orbit closures seem much more difficult to understand. However, in order to prove lower bounds in algebraic complexity theory, considering group orbits is not enough. In this paper we tighten the relationship between the orbit of the power sum polynomial and its closure, so that we can separate this orbit closure from the orbit closure of the product of variables by just considering the symmetry groups of both polynomials and their representation theoretic decomposition coefficients. In a natural way our construction yields a multiplicity obstruction that is neither an occurrence obstruction, nor a so-called vanishing ideal occurrence obstruction. All multiplicity obstructions so far have been of one of these two types. Our paper is the first implementation of the ambitious approach that was originally suggested in the first papers on geometric complexity theory by Mulmuley and Sohoni (SIAM J Comput 2001, 2008): Before our paper, all existence proofs of obstructions only took into account the symmetry group of one of the two polynomials (or tensors) that were to be separated. In our paper the multiplicity obstruction is obtained by comparing the representation theoretic decomposition coefficients of both symmetry groups. Our proof uses a semi-explicit description of the coordinate ring of the orbit closure of the power sum polynomial in terms of Young tableaux, which enables its comparison to the coordinate ring of the orbit.Comment: 47 page

On the complexity of evaluating highest weight vectors

Geometric complexity theory (GCT) is an approach towards separating algebraic complexity classes through algebraic geometry and representation theory. Originally Mulmuley and Sohoni proposed (SIAM J Comput 2001, 2008) to use occurrence obstructions to prove Valiant's determinant vs permanent conjecture, but recently B\"urgisser, Ikenmeyer, and Panova (Journal of the AMS 2019) proved this impossible. However, fundamental theorems of algebraic geometry and representation theory grant that every lower bound in GCT can be proved by the use of so-called highest weight vectors (HWVs). In the setting of interest in GCT (namely in the setting of polynomials) we prove the NP-hardness of the evaluation of HWVs in general, and we give efficient algorithms if the treewidth of the corresponding Young-diagram is small, where the point of evaluation is concisely encoded as a noncommutative algebraic branching program! In particular, this gives a large new class of separating functions that can be efficiently evaluated at points with low (border) Waring rank