Vanishing of doubly symmetrized tensors (Q396785)

Summary: Symmetrizations of tensors by irreducible characters of the symmetric group serve as natural analogues of symmetric and skew-symmetric tensors. The question of when a symmetrized decomposable tensor is non-zero is intimately related to the rank partition of a matroid extracted from the tensor. In this paper we characterize the non-vanishing of the symmetrization of certain partially symmetrized decomposable tensors. Our answers are phrased in terms of rank partitions of matroids.