Quasimaps, straightening laws, and quantum cohomology for the Lagrangian grassmannian (Q1005887)

This paper is about some pieces of algebra concerning the \textsl{quantum cohomology of the Lagrangian Grassmannian}, as the title announces. It is a very important subject, of very much current interest, and most of its beauty is due to the fact that its investigation requires a skillful tasty blend of algebra, geometry, algebraic geometry, combinatorics and some splash of theoretical mechanics flavor coming from equipping even dimensional complex vector spaces with a symplectic form. Key words for this paper are: \textsl{Grassmannians} (from geometry), \textsl{posets and dosets} (from combinatorics), \textsl{straightening law} (from algebra), \textsl{Drinfeld's Grassmannians} (from quantum cohomology of Lagrangian Grassmannians). The main result, invoked in the introduction as Theorem 1.1., states that \textsl{the coordinate ring of any Schubert subvariety of the Drinfel'd Lagrangian Grassmannian is an algebra with straightening law on a doset}: this extends previous analogous achievements by Sottile and Sturmfels, regarding ordinary grassmannians. Here are a few words to give the reader the feeling of what the above main result is about. What a Grassmannian \(G(k,n)\) is, the variety parameterizing \(k\)-dimensional vector subspaces of the \(n\)-dimensional complex space \(\mathbb{C}^n\), everybody knows. Equipping \(\mathbb{C}^{2n}\) with a maximal rank skew symmetric bilinear form \(\omega\), briefly said a \textsl{symplectic form}, one is led to distinguish \textsl{isotropic}, \textsl{coisotropic} or \textsl{lagrangian} subspaces (both \textsl{isotropic} and \textsl{coisotropic}), and \(LG(n)\) is the subvariety of \(G(n, 2n)\) parameterizing \(\omega\)-lagrangian subspaces, which are necessarily \(n\)-dimensional. The \textsl{Drinfeld's Grassmannian} is a suitable compactification of the space of holomorphic map from the Riemann sphere \(\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}^1\) to \(LG(n)\). Suitable Schubert subvarieties of the Drinfeld's Grassmannian can be defined. The quantum cohomology of the Lagrangian grassmannian is the intersection theory of the Drinfeld's Grassmannian. Thus, the main theorem of the paper under review has to do with the algebraic properties of the coordinate rings of Schubert subvarieties of the Drinfeld's Grassmannian, a result which can be easily spelled using a language borrowed from combinatorics. The term \textsl{poset} is just a shortcut standing for \textsl{partially ordered set}. For instance, if \([n]\) is the set of all first positive integers, the set of all increasingly ordered subsets of \(k\) elements is a \textsl{poset}. If \(P\) is a poset, let \(\Delta_P\) be the diagonal of \(P\times P\) and \(O_P:=\{(\alpha,\beta)\in P\times P\,|\, \alpha\leq \beta\}\) be the graph of the order relation defined in \(P\). A \textsl{doset} is a subset of \(P\times P\), which contains \(\Delta_P\) and is contained in \(O_P\), such that if \(\alpha\leq \beta\leq \gamma\) and \((\alpha,\gamma)\in D\), then \((\alpha,\beta)\) and \((\beta, \gamma)\) belongs to \(D\) as well. The set \(P\) is said to be the \textsl{underlying poset} of the doset \(D\). We shall not recall here what an \textsl{algebra with straightening law on a doset} is, a definition due to De Concini and Lakshmibai, and which is very clearly explained in the Definition 3.3 of the paper. However we must say that such an algebraic structure has to do with a special case of Hodge algebra which manifests itself within the coordinate ring of the projective embedding of a homogeneous space \(G/P\) (a generalized flag variety), and it turns out that the coordinate ring of the projective embedding is an \textsl{algebra with straightening law}, a fact noticed by Sottile and Sturmfels. The paper is divided into five sections. The introduction is followed by a section of preliminaries which is somewhat extended to Section 3, where the algebras with straightening laws are detailedly discussed, with many explicit computations. The intersection theory of Drinfeld's Grassmannian is analyzed in Section 4, while Section 5 goes back again on the straightening law, specifically for the coordinate rings of Schubert varieties of the Drinfeld's Grassmannian. The list of the references ends a paper which has evidently been written with the attempt of not loosing the non specialistic reader. The latter, however, could get some initial worries because in the preliminary section 2A, the notation \({[n]\choose k}\), used to define the set \({[n]\choose k}_d\), is seemingly introduced with no explanation. Its meaning, however, is explained in Section 2B, a few lines before Proposition 2.2, and then it suffices, for the interested reader, to give again a quick further reading of section 2A to get newly rid of what is going on.