Ribbon tableaux, ribbon rigged configurations and Hall-Littlewood functions at roots of unity (Q2426420)

\textit{A. Lascoux}, \textit{B. Leclerc}, and \textit{J.-Y. Thibon} [C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 316, 1--6 (1993; Zbl 0769.05095)] proved that the Hall-Littlewood functions indexed by rectangular partitions \((n^{k})\), where \(n,k\) are positive integers, specialized at a primitive \(k\)-th root of unity \(\zeta\), can be expressed as plethysms: \(Q'_{n^{k}}(X;\zeta)=(-1)^{(k-1)n}p_{k}\circ h_{n}(X)\) and \(\widetilde Q'_{n^{k}}(X;\zeta)=p_{k}\circ h_{n}(X)\), where \(p_{k}\) denotes the power sum and \(h_{n}\) denotes the complete symmetric polynomial (Theorem 1). The author provides a combinatorial proof of these identities, using {\parindent=6mm \begin{itemize}\item[(1)]the Stanton-White bijection \(\Psi_{k}\) between \(k\)-ribbon tableaux and \(k\)-tuples of semistandard Young tableaux; \item[(2)]Schilling's bijection \(\Theta_{k}\) between \(k\)-tuples of tableaux and ribbon rigged configurations; \item[(3)]the cospin \(\widetilde G\), inversion \(\widetilde I\) and cocharge \(\widetilde S\) polynomials associated with these three objects, and their restrictions to certain subsets, notably diagonal classes of \(k\)-tuples of tableaux. \end{itemize}} The line of argument is as follows. \textit{A. Lascoux}, \textit{B. Leclerc}, and \textit{J.-Y. Thibon} [J. Math. Phys. 38, No. 2, 1041--1068 (1997; Zbl 0869.05068)] showed that \(\widetilde Q'_{\lambda}(X;q)\) can be expressed in terms of the cospin polynomials \(\widetilde G_{l(\lambda)\lambda,\mu}^{(l(\lambda))}(q)\) associated with \(l(\lambda)\)-ribbon tableaux. Since \(\Psi_{k}\) is compatible with the inversion and cospin statistics, the inversion polynomial \(\widetilde I_{\lambda^{(k)},\mu}(q)\) associated with a \(k\)-tuple of semistandard Young tableau of shape \(\lambda^{(k)}=(\lambda,...,\lambda)\) equals \(\widetilde G_{\lambda,\mu}^{(k)}(q)\) (Proposition 1), so \(\widetilde Q'_{\lambda}(X;q)\) can be expressed in terms of the inversion polynomials (Proposition 2). This, together with Remark 1, means that \(\widetilde Q'_{\lambda}(X;q)\) can be expressed in terms of \(l(\lambda)\)-tuples of Young tableaux with shape the product of single-row partitions. Theorem 1 then follows from Corollary~1, which gives the specialization of the inversion polynomial for the \(k\)-tuple of single-row partitions \(((n),...,(n))\). The main prerequisite for Corollary~1 is Proposition~4, which asserts that the inversion polynomial restricted to certain diagonal classes vanishes at \(\zeta\). This follows from: {\parindent=6mm \begin{itemize}\item[(1)]The correspondence \(\Theta_{k}\) between \(k\)-tuples of tableaux and the rigged configurations of Schilling is compatible with cocharge and inversion, so the inversion polynomial and cocharge polynomials are equal (Theorem 2 and Proposition 5). \item[(2)]Schilling's explicit expression for the cocharge polynomial in terms of \(q\)-binomial coefficients (equation~(36)) has a convenient decomposition (equationn~(37)) on subsets of configurations of fixed shape. \item[(3)]These configurations turn out to be images of diagonal classes under \(\Theta_{k}\), so we obtain an explicit expression for \(\widetilde I_{\lambda^{0},\mu}(q;d)\) (Proposition 7). \end{itemize}} The article is clearly written and contains examples to illustrate key definitions and results.