Partial symmetries of iterated plethysms (Q6065680)

Plethysm is defined in the algebra of symmetric functions. It was originally related to compositions of Schur functors on representations of general linear groups. The problem of expanding plethysm \(s_\mu \circ s_\nu\) of two Schur functions in terms of Schur functions \(s_\lambda\), i.e., the problem of finding the coefficients \(a^\lambda_{\mu \nu}\) in the expansion \(s_\mu \circ s_\nu =\sum_{\lambda} a^\lambda_{\mu \nu} s_\lambda\), is both difficult and important. In this paper, the authors focus on the coefficients of \(s_{\lambda}\) with partitions \(\lambda\) of the forms \((\alpha,2^\beta,1^\gamma)\) in iterated plethysm \(s_{2} \circ s_b \circ s_a\) with \(a,b \ge 2\). As the first consequence, they explicitly determine all of such coefficients. As an example, their result gives a partial expansion \[ s_2 \circ s_2 \circ s_3= s_{(6,2,2,2)}+ 2s_{(8,2,2)} +2 s_{(10,2)} +s_{(12)} +s_{(9,2,1)}+ \textrm{(other terms)}. \] Their second result is to show that some of those coefficients have symmetry. In the example above, it is no coincidence that the coefficient of \(s_{(6,2,2,2)}\) is equal to the coefficient of \(s_{(12)}\). Likewise, it is no coincidence that the coefficient of \(s_{(8,2,2)}\) is equal to the coefficient of \(s_{(10,2)}\). They formulate these coincidences as flip-symmetry on partitions of the forms \((\alpha,2^\beta,1^\gamma)\).