Short antichains in root systems, semi-Catalan arrangements, and B-stable subspaces

Let \be be a Borel subalgebra of a complex simple Lie algebra \g. An ideal of \be is called ad-nilpotent, if it is contained in [\be,\be]. The generators of an ad-nilpotent ideal give rise to an antichain in the poset of positive roots, and the whole theory can be expressed in a combinatorial fashion, in terms of antichains. The aim of this paper is to present a refinement of the enumerative theory of ad-nilpotent ideals for the case in which \g has roots of different length. An antichain is called short, if it consists of short roots. We obtain, for short antichains, analogues of all results known for the usual antichains.Comment: LaTeX2e, 20 page

On the Duality of Semiantichains and Unichain Coverings

We study a min-max relation conjectured by Saks and West: For any two posets $P$ and $Q$ the size of a maximum semiantichain and the size of a minimum unichain covering in the product $P\times Q$ are equal. For positive we state conditions on $P$ and $Q$ that imply the min-max relation. Based on these conditions we identify some new families of posets where the conjecture holds and get easy proofs for several instances where the conjecture had been verified before. However, we also have examples showing that in general the min-max relation is false, i.e., we disprove the Saks-West conjecture.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Counting Proper Mergings of Chains and Antichains

A proper merging of two disjoint quasi-ordered sets $P$ and $Q$ is a quasi-order on the union of $P$ and $Q$ such that the restriction to $P$ and $Q$ yields the original quasi-order again and such that no elements of $P$ and $Q$ are identified. In this article, we consider the cases where $P$ and $Q$ are chains, where $P$ and $Q$ are antichains, and where $P$ is an antichain and $Q$ is a chain. We give formulas that determine the number of proper mergings in all three cases, and introduce two new bijections from proper mergings of two chains to plane partitions and from proper mergings of an antichain and a chain to monotone colorings of complete bipartite digraphs. Additionally, we use these bijections to count the Galois connections between two chains, and between a chain and a Boolean lattice respectively.Comment: 36 pages, 15 figures, 5 table

Dominant regions in noncrystallographic hyperplane arrangements

For a crystallographic root system, dominant regions in the Catalan hyperplane arrangement are in bijection with antichains in a partial order on the positive roots. For a noncrystallographic root system, the analogous arrangement and regions have importance in the representation theory of an associated graded Hecke algebra. Since there is also an analogous root order, it is natural to hope that a similar bijection can be used to understand these regions. We show that such a bijection does hold for type $H_3$ and for type $I_2(m)$, including arbitrary ratio of root lengths when $m$ is even, but does not hold for type $H_4$. We give a criterion that explains this failure and a list of the 16 antichains in the $H_4$ root order which correspond to empty regions.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure