A refinement of the shuffle conjecture with cars of two sizes and \(t=1/q\) (Q2448250)

The paper under review concerns algebraic combinatorics, giving a result which can be expressed in terms of either parking functions or symmetric functions. Expressing a parking function PF as a Dyck path with the northward edges labelled by the integers \(1,\dots,n\), two statistics can be defined: one is simply the area above the Dyck path, denoted coarea(PF), while the other, denoted dinv(PF), denotes the number of `diagonal inversions' of PF. The main result gives an expression in terms of \(q\)-binomial coefficients for the sum of terms \(q^{\text{coarea}(\text{PF})+\text{dinv}(\text{PF})}\), summing over those parking functions which (for a given choice of integers \(a\), \(b\), \(r\), \(s\)) have a reading word which is a shuffle of the words \(1,2,\dots,a\) and \(a+1,a+2,\dots,a+b\) and whose diagonal entries comprise \(r\) integers from \(\{1,\dots,a\}\) and \(s\) integers from \(\{a+1,\dots,a+b\}\). This is a refinement of a special case of the shuffle conjecture of \textit{J. Haglund} et al. [Duke Math. J. 126, No. 2, 195--232 (2005; Zbl 1069.05077)]. The proof is a neat combinatorial one, involving a recursion in \(a\), \(b\), \(r\) and \(s\). The paper is well written, and the authors give a very nice outline of the symmetric function side of their results. This is a nice addition to the literature.