Quantum and affine Schubert calculus and Macdonald polynomials (Q526357)

One of the main concerns of this multifaceted paper is that of dealing with the quantum cohomology of flag varieties parametrizing inclusions of subspaces of a given vector space, as well as to supply an innovative description of the product structure of the affine Grassmannian \(\mathrm{Gr}\) associated to the group \(\mathrm{SL}_n({\mathbb C})\). Just not to loose the less experienced reader, we recall that the \(\mathrm{Gr}\) we alluded above is in fact the quotient of the group of all \(n\times n\) unimodular square matrices with entries in the ring of Laurent series modulo the action of the subgroup of unimodular square matrices with entries in the ring of formal power series with complex coefficients. The new sharp description that the authors offer for the cohomology \(H^*(\mathrm{Gr})\) and homology \(H_*(\mathrm{Gr})\), whose details are richly displayed in Section 5, definitely shed light of the intimate relationship of the subject, the so-called affine Schubert calculus, with the rich, celebrated and still mysterious theory of Macdonald polynomials. The latter is about some of the richest objects in mathematics. As the authors themselves declare in a enthusiastically inspiring introduction, Macdonald polynomials do not occur just in combinatorics, but also in the theory of double affine Hecke algebras, quantum relativistic systems, diagonal harmonics and Hilbert schemes of points in the plane. The origin of the noble story told by the authors in the paper, has to do with a basic and a fundamental question. Nearly every professional mathematician is aware that symmetric polynomials admit a basis of Schur polynomials, parametrized by partitions of non-negative integers. Although we shall not recall here their definition, Macdonald polynomials may be seen as symmetric polynomials depending on two extra parameters, say \(t\) and \(q\), and it is then natural to wonder about the transition matrix relating them with the more familiar Schur polynomials. The still open conjecture is that the entries of the transition matrix, a generalization of the so called Kostka-Foulkes polynomial, are polynomials with non-negative integer coefficients. In other words, Macdonald polynomials relate positively to Schur polynomials, a conjecture that inspired many more researches whose output has been the dramatic emerging of the relationship with the affine Schubert calculus. The authors so come to cope with the problem of a more flexible description of the homology and cohomology of \(\mathrm{Gr}\) by introducing a clever new combinatorial tool, which is of crucial importance in all the paper, called Affine Bruhat Countertableaux (ABC). Their generating functions form a basis of \(H^*(\mathrm{Gr})\) and everything leads to a refinement of the Kotska-Foulkes polynomials. The authors deal also with the problem of providing a closer description of the constants structure of the quantum cohomology of flag varieties, where Gromov-Witten invariants related with the art of counting rational curves in homogeneous varieties. There are many more beautiful and interesting features, in this paper, that deserve to be discussed, but this at the price of giving a more detailed account of the fine technical combinatorial tools masterly employed by the authors. This cannot be evidently done in a review, but we can end it by quickly describing the organization. Let us start from the abstract: it already contains the juice of the article and say the reader what it can be found inside. The introduction is simply as beautiful as exciting and is enhanced by the second section where there is a useful interesting account of the related literature. The preliminaries are collected in Section 3: here the reader can be made aware with selected tools from the theory of symmetric functions, explain the basic vocabulary related with Ferrer diagrams, horizontal strips, addable corners, extremal cells and so on. Section 4 enters into the deep core of the paper, being devoted to the affine Pieri's rule, described in terms of sophisticated but versatile combinatorics. The explicit representative of Schubert classes is provided in this section, where the ABC order is also introduced. More relations with Macdonald polynomials are collected in Section 6. The rich reference list is still preceded by an appendix where the output of a Sage routine is displayed to check a conjecture on the equality of two kinds of symmetric functions and by section 7, eventually devoted to the quantum cohomology of the flags.