Block decomposition of permutations and Schur-positivity (Q1668673)

This paper sits at the crossroads of algebraic combinatorics concerning Schur-positivity and enumerative combinatorics concerning refined equidistribution by a certain permutation statistic called block number. Ever since \textit{I. M. Gessel} and \textit{C. Reutenauer}'s paper [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 64, No. 2, 189--215 (1993; Zbl 0793.05004)], it has been a long-standing problem to determine which subsets \(A\subseteq S_n\) are \(\mathcal{Q}(A)\) symmetric. Here, \(S_n\) is the \(n\)-th symmetric group and \[ \mathcal{Q}(A):=\sum_{\pi\in A}\mathcal{F}_{n,\mathrm{Des}(\pi)} \] is the quasi-symmetric function in terms of Gessel's fundamental quasi-symmetric function \(\mathcal{F}_{n,D}\). \(\mathrm{Des}(\pi):=\{i : \pi(i)>\pi(i+1)\}\) is the descent set of a permutation \(\pi\). And when \(\mathcal{Q}(A)\) is indeed symmetric, a further question on its Schur-positivity (i.e., the property that it has all non-negative coefficients when expanded in the Schur-basis) is usually considered as well. When we take the block numbers (see Section 3.1 for the definition) of permutations into consideration, and denote the refined subsets as \(Bl_{n,k}\), for \(1\le k\le n\), then the main result, Theorem 1.2, of this paper is an explicit expression of \(\mathcal{Q}(Bl_{n.k})\) using Frobenius characteristic map \(\mathrm{ch}\), which in particular establishes its Schur-positivity. The proof of this main result hangs on an equidistribution result (Theorem 1.3) concerning the aforementioned statistic \(\mathrm{bl}\) (i.e., block number) and the last descent statistic \(\mathrm{ldes}(\pi):=\max\{i : i\in\mathrm{Des}(\pi)\}\). As far as I am concerned, there have been two refinements/analogues of Theorem 1.3: 1. A quick follow-up paper by \textit{M. Rubey} [Sémin. Lothar. Comb. 77, B77f, 4 p. (2018; Zbl 1396.05005)], which strengthens this equidistribution to a joint symmetric equidistribution, and whose proof is conducted in terms of Dyck paths. 2. A recent joint paper [\textit{S. Fu} et al., ``Refined Wilf-equivalences by Comtet statistics'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2009.04269}], which gives an alternative proof of Rubey's result directly on permutations, and presents analogous equidistribution phenomenon over other pattern-avoiding subsets of permutations. It remains to be seen whether these ensuing developments have any implications towards Schur-positivities of these subsets of permutations and permutation statistics. Such pairs are called ``pattern-statistic Schur-positive pairs'' in this paper. And it has also been raised as Problem 6.3 as to find further instances of such pairs. For readers' convenience, we briefly outline the structure of this paper. Section 1: Background of the problem and statements of the main results. Section 2.1: Introduces various statistics on permutations and tableaux, makes several initial observations. Section 2.2: Introduces the \(k\)-fold Catalan numbers (or ballot numbers) and interprets them using 321-avoiding permutations as well as standard Young tableaux with two-line shape. Section 2.3: Reviews basic facts about symmetric and quasi-symmetric functions. Section 3: Introduces the block number of a permutation and shows its connection with \(k\)-fold Catalan numbers. Section 4: Proves Theorem 1.3 via a recursively constructed bijection. This is the most technical part of the paper, it contains a lot of case-by-case analysis. Section 5: Theorem 1.3 is applied to deduce Theorem 1.2, the Schur-positivity result. A concrete Example 5.1 is included to illustrate a key step of the proof. Section 6: Two future lines of research are suggested.