Some degenerations of Kazhdan-Lusztig ideals and multiplicities of Schubert varieties (Q655356)

The authors study the Hilbert--Samuel multiplicity for points of Schubert varieties in the complete flag variety via Gröbner degenerations of the Kazhdan--Lusztig ideal. It is an open problem to give a manifestly positive combinatorial rule for the multiplicity of a Schubert variety \(X_w\) at its torus fixed points \(e_v\in X_w\). In the special case of Grassmannians, this problem was solved about 10 years ago. The author's approach to the problem runs as follows. A neighborhood of \(e_v \in X_w\) is encoded by the Kazhdan--Lusztig variety \({\mathcal N}_{v,w}\). It is proposed to study a term order \(\prec_{v,w,\pi}\) that depends on \(v, w\) and a shuffling (total ordering) of variables \(\pi\). The corresponding Gröbner degenerations break \({\mathcal N}_{v,w}\), and its tangent cone, into an initial scheme \(\text{{init}}_{\prec_{v,w,\pi}} {\mathcal N}_{v,w}\) whose reduced scheme structure is a union of coordinate subspaces. By construction, multiplicity is the degree of this monomial ideal. It is known that the limit is set-theoretically equidimensional. The authors conjecture that (1) there exists \(\pi\) such that \(\text{init}_{\prec_{v,w,\pi}} {\mathcal N}_{v,w}\) is reduced; and (2) one can choose \(\pi\) such that the corresponding Stanley--Reisner simplicial complex is homeomorphic to a shellable ball or sphere. The main result of this article proves these conjectures for the covexillary Schubert varieties, i.e., those \(X_w\), where \(w\) avoids the pattern \(3421\). For covexillary Schubert varieties, the key observation is that one can pick \(\pi\) (depending on \(v,w\)) such that the limit scheme is (after \(\pi\)-shuffling the coordinates and crossing by affine space) the limit scheme of a matrix Schubert variety for another covexillary permutation. This yields an explicit Gröbner basis, with squarefree initial terms, for the Kazhdan--Lusztig ideal under \(\prec_{v,w,\pi}\). The authors prove that the limit is reduced, its Stanley--Reisner simplicial complex is homeomorphic to a shellable ball or sphere, and the multiplicity counts the number of facets of this complex. They also obtain a formula for the Hilbert series of the local ring. This extends work of \textit{V. Lakshmibai} and \textit{J. Weyman} [Adv. Math. 84, No. 2, 179--208 (1990; Zbl 0729.14037)], \textit{J. Rosenthal} and \textit{A. Zelevinsky} [J. Algebr. Comb. 13, 213--218 (2001; Zbl 1015.14025)], \textit{C. Krattenthaler} [Sémin. Lothar. Comb. 45, B45c, 11 p. (2000; Zbl 0965.14023)], \textit{V. Kodiyalam} and \textit{K. N. Raghavan} [J. Algebra 270, No. 1, 28--54 (2003; Zbl 1083.14056)], \textit{V. Kreiman} and \textit{V. Lakshmibai} [Multiplicities of singular points in Schubert varieties of Grassmannians. Berlin: Springer, 553--563 (2003; Zbl 1092.14060)], \textit{T. Ikeda} and \textit{H. Naruse} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 361, No. 10, 5193--5221 (2009; Zbl 1229.05287)] and \textit{A. Woo} and \textit{A. Yong} [A Gröbner basis for Kazhdan-Lusztig ideals, preprint (2009), \url{arXiv:0909.0564}].