Poset pinball, highest forms, and \((n-2,2)\) Springer varieties (Q426829)

Summary: We study type \(A\) nilpotent Hessenberg varieties equipped with a natural \(S^1\)-action using techniques introduced by Tymoczko, Harada-Tymoczko, and Bayegan-Harada, with a particular emphasis on a special class of nilpotent Springer varieties corresponding to the partition \(\lambda= (n-2,2)\) for \(n \geq 4\). First we define the adjacent-pair matrix corresponding to any filling of a Young diagram with \(n\) boxes with the alphabet \(\{1,2,\ldots,n\}\). Using the adjacent-pair matrix we make more explicit and also extend some statements concerning highest forms of linear operators in previous work of Tymoczko. Second, for a nilpotent operator \(N\) and Hessenberg function \(h\), we construct an explicit bijection between the \(S^1\)-fixed points of the nilpotent Hessenberg variety \(\mathrm{Hess}(N,h)\) and the set of \((h,\lambda_N)\)-permissible fillings of the Young diagram \(\lambda_N\). Third, we use poset pinball, the combinatorial game introduced by Harada and Tymoczko, to study the \(S^1\)-equivariant cohomology of type \(A\) Springer varieties \(\mathcal{S}_{(n-2,2)}\) associated to Young diagrams of shape \((n-2,2)\) for \(n\geq 4\). Specifically, we use the dimension pair algorithm for Betti-acceptable pinball described by Bayegan and Harada to specify a subset of the equivariant Schubert classes in the \(\mathbb{T}\)-equivariant cohomology of the flag variety \(\mathcal{F}\ell ags(\mathbb{C}^n) \cong \mathrm{GL}(n,\mathbb{C})/B\) which maps to a module basis of \(H^*_{S^1}(\mathcal{S}_{(n-2,2)})\) under the projection map \(H^*_\mathbb{T}(\mathcal{F}\ell \mathrm{ags}(\mathbb{C}^n)) \to H^*_{S^1}(\mathcal{S}_{(n-2,2)})\). Our poset pinball module basis is not poset-upper-triangular; this is the first concrete such example in the literature. A straightforward consequence of our proof is that there exists a simple and explicit change of basis which transforms our poset pinball basis to a poset-upper-triangular module basis for \(H^*_{S^1}(\mathcal{S}_{(n-2,2)})\). We close with open questions for future work.