Macdonald's symmetric polynomials as zonal spherical functions on some quantum homogeneous spaces (Q1816390)

In this impressive paper the author introduces quantum analogues of the homogeneous spaces \(\text{GL}(n)/\text{SO}(n)\) and \(\text{GL}(2n)/\text{Sp}(2n)\), for general \(n\), and studies the zonal spherical functions associated with finite dimensional representations. The quantum groups are introduced via the \(R\)-matrix formalism. The quantum analogy of \(\text{GL}(n)/\text{SO}(n)\) is essentially that studied by \textit{K. Ueno} and \textit{T. Takebayashi} [Quantum groups, Proc. Workshops, Euler Int. Math. Inst. Leningrad/USSR 1990, Lect. Notes Math. 1510, 142--147 (1992; Zbl 0743.33012)] but the computation of the spherical functions is new. The author shows that the zonal spherical functions can be identified with Macdonald's symmetric functions \(P_\mu(x_1,\cdots,x_n;q,t)\) with \((q,t)\) replaced by \((q^4,q^2)\) in the case \(\text{SO}\), and by \((q^2,q^4)\) in the case \(Sp\).