Canonical bases for the quantum group of type \(A_r\) and piecewise-linear combinatorics (Q1919634)

The authors investigate combinatorial properties of the dual of the canonical basis in the case of finite dimensional irreducible representations \(V\) of \(\text{sl}(n)\). They show that the subspaces of all elements of \(V\) killed by given powers of the positive simple root vectors are spanned by vectors of the canonical basis, and even determine these basis vectors. This leads to a new understanding of the Littlewood-Richardson rule. They also show that when viewing \(V\) as a polynomial representation of \(\text{GL}(n)\), the permutation matrix corresponding to the longest element of the Weyl group acts on the canonical basis as a permutation (up to a sign), and this permutation is shown to correspond under a suitable parametrization of the canonical basis by tableaux to the so-called Schützenberger involution. In fact, the authors work in the quantum set-up, and the results started above come out for \(q =1\).