Jeu de taquin dynamics on infinite Young tableaux and second class particles (Q2338913)

With a given partition \(\lambda\) of an integer \(n\) it is associated a Young diagram. The set \({\mathcal Y}\) of all Young diagrams forms the vertex set of the directed Young graph in which two diagrams (= vertices) \(\lambda\) and \(\nu \) are connected by an edge, if \(| \nu|=|\lambda| +1\) and if \(\nu \) is obtained from \(\lambda\) by the addition of a single box. A Young tableau (= standard Young tableau) is a Young diagram of size \(n\) filled by \(1,2,\ldots, n\) in such a way that numbers in each row and each column are in increasing order. There is a bijection between Young tableaux of a shape \(\lambda\) and paths in the Young graph leading to \(\lambda.\) Such a path is a sequence \(\emptyset=\lambda_0,\lambda_1,\ldots,\lambda_n=\lambda\) of a Young tableaux, such that \(\lambda_k\) is formed of those boxes of \(\lambda\) which contain numbers \(\leq k\). Similarly, the infinite Young tableaux are in bijection with those infinite paths in a Young graph that start with empty tableau and lead to a given infinite tableau. Next, a process known as {\textit{jeu de taquin}} or sliding game is defined. The {\textit{jeu de taquin}} path of a given tableau is obtained by starting from the corner box and then moving by unit steps to the right and up, each time choosing the one of the two direction for which the entry of the tableau is smaller. The aforementioned path is used to transform the obtained tableau \(t\) to a tableau \(J(t)\) defined in the following manner. The box in the corner is removed and on the vacant place is ``slided'' to the second box of the path, and so on. The authors study the {\textit{jeu de taquin}} process on the set of infinite tableaux equipped with the Plancherel measure \(P\). It is proven that \(J\) is a measure preserving transformation and that the induced dynamical system \((\Omega,P,J)\) is ergodic. This paper provides a deep and comprehensive study of the stochastic process on infinite tableaux induced by the {\textit{jeu de taquin}}. The main result of the paper says that the {\textit{jeu de taquin}} path converges \(P\)-almost surely to a straight line with a random direction. The proof uses the tools from representation theory of the symmetric group.