Promotion of increasing tableaux: frames and homomesies (Q2401436)

Summary: A key fact about \textit{M.-P. Schützenberger}'s promotion operator [Discrete Math. 2, 73--94 (1972; Zbl 0279.06001)] on rectangular standard Young tableaux is that iterating promotion once per entry recovers the original tableau. For tableaux with strictly increasing rows and columns, \textit{H. Thomas} and \textit{A. Yong} [Adv. Appl. Math. 46, No. 1--4, 610--642 (2011; Zbl 1227.05262)] introduced a theory of \(K\)-jeu de taquin with applications to \(K\)-theoretic Schubert calculus. The author [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 125, 357--378 (2014; Zbl 1295.05265)] studied a \(K\)-promotion operator \(\mathcal{P}\) derived from this theory, but observed that this key fact does not generally extend to \(K\)-promotion of such increasing tableaux. Here, we show that the key fact holds for labels on the boundary of the rectangle. That is, for \(T\) a rectangular increasing tableau with entries bounded by \(q\), we have \(\mathsf{Frame}(\mathcal{P}^q(T)) = \mathsf{Frame}(T)\), where \(\mathsf{Frame}(U)\) denotes the restriction of \(U\) to its first and last row and column. Using this fact, we obtain a family of homomesy results on the average value of certain statistics over \(K\)-promotion orbits, extending a 2-row theorem of \textit{J. Bloom} et al. [Discrete Math. 339, No. 1, 194--206 (2016; Zbl 1322.05136)] to arbitrary rectangular shapes.