Principal specialization of dual characters of flagged Weyl modules (Q2665956)

A flagged Weyl module is a representation of the group of invertible upper triangular \(n\times n\) matrices, associated with a diagram \(D\) with \(n\) columns. Schubert polynomials and key polynomials are special cases of the dual chararacters of these modules. The principal specialization of Schubert polynomials has long been of interest. The authors prove a lower bound on the principal specialization of the dual characters of flagged Weyl modules; when specialized to Schubert polynomials, this gives a new proof of a conjecture of Stanley originally proved in [\textit{A. E. Weigandt}, Algebr. Comb. 1, No. 4, 415--423 (2018; Zbl 1397.05205)]. They also characterize the diagrams which give equality. In the case of equality, all nonzero coefficients of the character are 1. There is a conjectural characterizaton of all cases in which the nonzero coefficients are all 1, which is known for Schubert and key polynomials. There is also a conjecture for when the known upper bound gives equality.