An affine generalization of evacuation (Q5918698)

Evacuation is an involution on standard Young tableaux of a given shape. Under the Robinson-Schensted bijection, it corresponds to the natural involution on the symmetric group of permutations that rotates the permutation matrix \(180^\circ\) around its center (equivalently, that conjugates by the longest element). It commutes with Knuth relations and so gives a symmetry of the dual equivalence graphs, whose vertices are tableaux and whose edges are Knuth moves. In terms of representation theory, this means that evacuation provides an action on the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis which permutes left (resp., right) cells within each two-sided cell. In this paper, the authors construct a parallel story for the affine symmetric group. This group is an infinite analogue of the symmetric group, and much of the beautiful combinatorics and representation theory of the symmetric group can be extended to the affine setting. The main result shows that the number of fixed points under evacuation in the affine setting is given by evaluating a certain Green polynomial at \(q=-1\), and satisfies a ``domino-like'' recurrence relation.