Canonical Decompositions of Affine Permutations, Affine Codes, and Split k-Schur Functions Tom Denton∗ Department of Mathematics York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada
[email protected] Submitted: Apr 12, 2012; Accepted: Oct 8, 2012; Published: Nov 8, 2012 Mathematics Subject Classifications: 05E05, 05E15 Abstract We develop a new perspective on the unique maximal decomposition of an arbitrary affine permutation into a product of cyclically decreasing elements, implicit in work of Thomas Lam [Lam06]. This decomposition is closely related to the affine code, which generalizes the k- bounded partition associated to Grassmannian elements. We also prove that the affine code readily encodes a number of basic combinatorial properties of an affine permutation. As an application, we prove a new special case of the Littlewood-Richardson Rule for k-Schur functions, using the canonical decomposition to control for which permutations appear in the expansion of the k-Schur function in noncommuting variables over the affine nil-Coxeter algebra. ∗Supported by York University and the Fields Institute. the electronic journal of combinatorics 19(4) (2012), #P19 1 Contents 1 Introduction 2 1.1 Further Directions. ............................... 5 1.2 Overview ..................................... 5 1.3 Acknowledgements ............................... 6 2 Background and Definitions 7 2.1 The Affine Nilcoxeter Algebra and Affine Permutations. ........... 7 2.2 Cyclic Elements in Ak. ............................. 11 2.3 k-Schur Functions. ............................... 12 3 Canonical Cyclic Decompositions and k-Codes 14 3.1 Maximal Cyclic Decompositions and k-Codes ................ 15 3.2 Maximizing Moves on k-Codes. ........................ 18 3.3 Insertion Algorithm. .............................. 22 3.4 Bijection Between Affine Permutations and k-Codes. ............ 23 3.5 Relating the Various Cyclic Decompositions of an Affine Permutation.