A root system criterion for fully commutative and short braid-avoiding elements in affine Weyl groups (Q1975181)

\textit{C.~K.~Fan} [Transform. Groups 3, No. 1, 51-56 (1998; Zbl 0912.20033)] following Zelevinski introduced the following notation for elements of a Coxeter system \((W,S)\). An element \(w\in W\) is short-braid avoiding if no reduced expression of \(w\) contains a substring of the form \(sts\), \(s,t\in S\). The notation of short-braid avoiding element is strictly related to the following definitions, due to \textit{C.~K.~Fan} [A Hecke algebra quotient and properties of commutative elements of a Weyl group. MIT Thesis (1995)] and \textit{J.~R.~Stembridge} [J. Algebr. Comb. 5, No. 4, 353-385 (1996; Zbl 0864.20025)]. Consider \(s,t\in S\) and denote by \(m(s,t)\) the order of \(st\in W\). We call the string \(\underbrace{st\cdots}_{m(s,t)}\) the long braid of \(s\) and \(t\). For \(w\in W\) we say that \(w\) is commutative if no reduced expression of \(w\) contains a substring of form \(sts\), \(s,t\) being non-commuting generators in \(S\) such that the simple root corresponding to \(t\) is at least as long as the simple root corresponding to \(s\). For \(w\in W\) we say that \(w\) is fully commutative if no reduced expression of \(w\) contains the long braid of some pair of non-commuting generators. In this paper the authors provide simple characterizations of short-braid avoiding and fully commutative elements in an affine Weyl group, generalizing results of Fan and Stembridge for finite Weyl groups. Their results rely on the combinatorics of the compatible subsets of the root system of \(W\).