Shape Avoiding Permutations

Permutations avoiding all patterns of a given shape (in the sense of Robinson-Schensted-Knuth) are considered. We show that the shapes of all such permutations are contained in a suitable thick hook, and deduce an exponential growth rate for their number.Comment: 16 pages; final form, to appear in J. Combin. Theory, Series

The number of inversions of permutations with fixed shape

The Robinson-Schensted correspondence can be viewed as a map from permutations to partitions. In this work, we study the number of inversions of permutations corresponding to a fixed partition $\lambda$ under this map. Hohlweg characterized permutations having shape $\lambda$ with the minimum number of inversions. Here, we give the first results in this direction for higher numbers of inversions. We give explicit conjectures for both the structure and the number of permutations associated to $\lambda$ where the extra number of inversions is less than the length of the smallest column of $\lambda$. We prove the result when $\lambda$ has two columns.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Two-sided cells in type BB (asymptotic case)

We compute two-sided cells of Weyl groups of type $B$ for the "asymptotic" choice of parameters. We also obtain some partial results concerning Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures in this particular case.Comment: 20 pages, some misprints have been cleaned up in this second versio

The exotic Robinson-Schensted correspondence

We study the action of the symplectic group on pairs of a vector and a flag. Considering the irreducible components of the conormal variety, we obtain an exotic analogue of the Robinson-Schensted correspondence. Conjecturally, the resulting cells are related to exotic character sheaves.Comment: 14 page