Orthosymplectic Lie superalgebras, Koszul duality, and a complete intersection analogue of the Eagon-Northcott complex

We study the ideal of maximal minors in Littlewood varieties, a class of quadratic complete intersections in spaces of matrices. We give a geometric construction for a large class of modules, including all powers of this ideal, and show that they have a linear free resolution over the complete intersection and that their Koszul dual is an infinite-dimensional irreducible representation of the orthosymplectic Lie superalgebra. We calculate the algebra of cohomology operators acting on this free resolution. We prove analogous results for powers of the ideals of maximal minors in the variety of length 2 complexes when it is a complete intersection, and show that their Koszul dual is an infinite-dimensional irreducible representation of the general linear Lie superalgebra. This generalizes work of Akin, J\'ozefiak, Pragacz, Weyman, and the author on resolutions of determinantal ideals in polynomial rings to the setting of complete intersections and provides a new connection between representations of classical Lie superalgebras and commutative algebra. As a curious application, we prove that the cohomology of a class of reducible homogeneous bundles on symplectic and orthogonal Grassmannians and 2-step flag varieties can be calculated by an analogue of the Borel-Weil-Bott theorem.Comment: 35 pages; v2: updated reference

Gr\"obner methods for representations of combinatorial categories

Given a category C of a combinatorial nature, we study the following fundamental question: how does the combinatorial behavior of C affect the algebraic behavior of representations of C? We prove two general results. The first gives a combinatorial criterion for representations of C to admit a theory of Gr\"obner bases. From this, we obtain a criterion for noetherianity of representations. The second gives a combinatorial criterion for a general "rationality" result for Hilbert series of representations of C. This criterion connects to the theory of formal languages, and makes essential use of results on the generating functions of languages, such as the transfer-matrix method and the Chomsky-Sch\"utzenberger theorem. Our work is motivated by recent work in the literature on representations of various specific categories. Our general criteria recover many of the results on these categories that had been proved by ad hoc means, and often yield cleaner proofs and stronger statements. For example: we give a new, more robust, proof that FI-modules (originally introduced by Church-Ellenberg-Farb), and a family of natural generalizations, are noetherian; we give an easy proof of a generalization of the Lannes-Schwartz artinian conjecture from the study of generic representation theory of finite fields; we significantly improve the theory of $\Delta$-modules, introduced by Snowden in connection to syzygies of Segre embeddings; and we establish fundamental properties of twisted commutative algebras in positive characteristic.Comment: 41 pages; v2: Moved old Sections 3.4, 10, 11, 13.2 and connected text to arxiv:1410.6054v1, Section 13.1 removed and will appear elsewhere; v3: substantial revision and reorganization of section

Hilbert series for twisted commutative algebras

Suppose that for each n >= 0 we have a representation $M_n$ of the symmetric group S_n. Such sequences arise in a wide variety of contexts, and often exhibit uniformity in some way. We prove a number of general results along these lines in this paper: our prototypical theorem states that if $M_n$ can be given a suitable module structure over a twisted commutative algebra then the sequence $M_n$ follows a predictable pattern. We phrase these results precisely in the language of Hilbert series (or Poincar\'e series, or formal characters) of modules over tca's.Comment: 28 page

VIC-modules over noncommutative rings

For a finite ring $R$, not necessarily commutative, we prove that the category of $\text{VIC}(R)$-modules over a left Noetherian ring $\mathbf{k}$ is locally Noetherian, generalizing a theorem of the authors that dealt with commutative $R$. As an application, we prove a very general twisted homology stability for $\text{GL}_n(R)$ with $R$ a finite noncommutative ring.Comment: 20 page