Combinatorial Hopf algebras, noncommutative Hall-Littlewood functions, and permutation tableaux

We introduce a new family of noncommutative analogues of the Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions. Our construction relies upon Tevlin's bases and simple q-deformations of the classical combinatorial Hopf algebras. We connect our new Hall-Littlewood functions to permutation tableaux, and also give an exact formula for the q-enumeration of permutation tableaux of a fixed shape. This gives an explicit formula for: the steady state probability of each state in the partially asymmetric exclusion process (PASEP); the polynomial enumerating permutations with a fixed set of weak excedances according to crossings; the polynomial enumerating permutations with a fixed set of descent bottoms according to occurrences of the generalized pattern 2-31.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figures, new references adde

One-skeleton galleries, the path model and a generalization of Macdonald's formula for Hall-Littlewood polynomials

We give a direct geometric interpretation of the path model using galleries in the $1-$skeleton of the Bruhat-Tits building associated to a semi-simple algebraic group. This interpretation allows us to compute the coefficients of the expansion of the Hall-Littlewood polynomials in the monomial basis. The formula we obtain is a "geometric compression" of the one proved by Schwer, its specialization to the case ${\tt A}_n$ turns out to be equivalent to Macdonald's formula.Comment: 43 pages, 3 pictures, some improvements in the presentation, semistandard tableaux for type B and C define

Plethysm and lattice point counting

We apply lattice point counting methods to compute the multiplicities in the plethysm of $GL(n)$. Our approach gives insight into the asymptotic growth of the plethysm and makes the problem amenable to computer algebra. We prove an old conjecture of Howe on the leading term of plethysm. For any partition $\mu$ of 3,4, or 5 we obtain an explicit formula in $\lambda$ and $k$ for the multiplicity of $S^\lambda$ in $S^\mu(S^k)$.Comment: 25 pages including appendix, 1 figure, computational results and code available at http://thomas-kahle.de/plethysm.html, v2: various improvements, v3: final version appeared in JFoC