The toric ideal of a graphic matroid is generated by quadrics

Describing minimal generating sets of toric ideals is a well-studied and difficult problem. Neil White conjectured in 1980 that the toric ideal associated to a matroid is generated by quadrics corresponding to single element symmetric exchanges. We give a combinatorial proof of White's conjecture for graphic matroids.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Cyclage, catabolism, and the affine Hecke algebra

We identify a subalgebra \pH_n of the extended affine Hecke algebra \eH_n of type A. The subalgebra \pH_n is a \u-analogue of the monoid algebra of \S_n \ltimes \ZZ_{\geq 0}^n and inherits a canonical basis from that of \eH_n. We show that its left cells are naturally labeled by tableaux filled with positive integer entries having distinct residues mod n, which we term \emph{positive affine tableaux} (PAT). We then exhibit a cellular subquotient \R_{1^n} of \pH_n that is a \u-analogue of the ring of coinvariants \CC[y_1,...,y_n]/(e_1,...,e_n) with left cells labeled by PAT that are essentially standard Young tableaux with cocharge labels. Multiplying canonical basis elements by a certain element \pi \in \pH_n corresponds to rotations of words, and on cells corresponds to cocyclage. We further show that \R_{1^n} has cellular quotients \R_\lambda that are \u-analogues of the Garsia-Procesi modules R_\lambda with left cells labeled by (a PAT version of) the \lambda-catabolizable tableaux. We give a conjectural description of a cellular filtration of \pH_n, the subquotients of which are isomorphic to dual versions of \R_\lambda under the perfect pairing on \R_{1^n}. We conjecture how this filtration relates to the combinatorics of the cells of \eH_n worked out by Shi, Lusztig, and Xi. We also conjecture that the k-atoms of Lascoux, Lapointe, and Morse and the R-catabolizable tableaux of Shimozono and Weyman have cellular counterparts in \pH_n. We extend the idea of atom copies of Lascoux, Lapoint, and Morse to positive affine tableaux and give descriptions, mostly conjectural, of some of these copies in terms of catabolizability.Comment: 58 pages, youngtab.sty included for tableau

Kronecker coefficients for one hook shape

We give a positive combinatorial formula for the Kronecker coefficient g_{lambda mu(d) nu} for any partitions lambda, nu of n and hook shape mu(d) := (n-d,1^d). Our main tool is Haiman's \emph{mixed insertion}. This is a generalization of Schensted insertion to \emph{colored words}, words in the alphabet of barred letters \bar{1},\bar{2},... and unbarred letters 1,2,.... We define the set of \emph{colored Yamanouchi tableaux of content lambda and total color d} (CYT_{lambda, d}) to be the set of mixed insertion tableaux of colored words w with exactly d barred letters and such that w^{blft} is a Yamanouchi word of content lambda, where w^{blft} is the ordinary word formed from w by shuffling its barred letters to the left and then removing their bars. We prove that g_{lambda mu(d) nu} is equal to the number of CYT_{lambda, d} of shape nu with unbarred southwest corner.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure

Random Oxford Graphs

Inspired by a concept in comparative genomics, we investigate properties of randomly chosen members of G_1(m,n,t), the set of bipartite graphs with $m$ left vertices, n right vertices, t edges, and each vertex of degree at least one. We give asymptotic results for the number of such graphs and the number of $(i,j)$ trees they contain. We compute the thresholds for the emergence of a giant component and for the graph to be connected