Row bounds needed to justifiably express flagged Schur functions with Gessel-Viennot determinants

TL;DR

This paper extends the determinant expression for flagged Schur functions by removing the weakly increasing restriction on bounding sequences, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for nonpermutability, and linking to parabolic Catalan numbers and Demazure characters.

Contribution

It generalizes flagged Schur functions by characterizing nonpermutable pairs without the weakly increasing constraint on $eta$, and introduces efficient bounding sequences for determinant computation.

Findings

Established necessary and sufficient conditions for nonpermutability.

Grouped bounding sequences into equivalence classes for efficiency.

Connected determinant expressions to parabolic Catalan numbers and Demazure characters.

Abstract

Let $\lambda$ be a partition with no more than $n$ parts. Let $\beta$ be a weakly increasing $n$-tuple with entries from $\{ 1, ... , n \}$. The flagged Schur function in the variables $x_1, ... , x_n$ that is indexed by $\lambda$ and $\beta$ has been defined to be the sum of the content weight monomials for the semistandard Young tableaux of shape $\lambda$ whose values are row-wise bounded by the entries of $\beta$. Gessel and Viennot gave a determinant expression for the flagged Schur function indexed by $\lambda$ and $\beta$; this could be done since the pair $(\lambda, \beta)$ satisfied their "nonpermutable" condition for the sequence of terminals of an $n$-tuple of lattice paths that they used to model the tableaux. We generalize flagged Schur functions by dropping the requirement that $\beta$ be weakly increasing. Then for each $\lambda$ we give a condition on the entries of $\beta$ for the pair $(\lambda, \beta)$ to be nonpermutable that is both necessary and sufficient. When the parts of $\lambda$ are not distinct there will be multiple row bound $n$-tuples $\beta$ that will produce the same set of tableaux. We accordingly group the bounding $\beta$ into equivalence classes and identify the most efficient $\beta$ in each class for the determinant computation. We recently showed that many other sets of objects that are indexed by $n$ and $\lambda$ are enumerated by the number of these efficient $n$-tuples. We called these counts "parabolic Catalan numbers". It is noted that the $GL(n)$ Demazure characters (key polynomials) indexed by 312-avoiding permutations can also be expressed with these determinants.