A pattern avoidance criterion for free inversion arrangements (Q737979)

A central hyperplane arrangement \(A\) in the vector space \(\mathbb R^l\) is said to be free if its module of derivations \(\mathrm{Der}(A)\) is free. If \(A\) is free, then \(\mathrm{Der}(A)\) has a homogeneous basis of size \(l\), and the degrees \(d_1,\dots, d_l\) of the generators are the coexponents of \(A\). The best known free arrangements are the Coxeter arrangements, cut out by the root systems of finite Coxeter groups, for which the coexponents are equal to the exponents of the Coxeter group. It is natural to ask when a subarrangement of a Coxeter arrangement is free. In this paper the authors show that the hyperplane arrangement of a coconvex set in a finite root system is free if and only if it is free in corank \(4\). As a consequence, they show that the inversion arrangement of a Weyl group element \(w\) is free if and only if \(w\) avoids a finite list of root system patterns. As a key part of the proof, they use a recent theorem of Abe and Yoshinaga to show that if the root system does not contain any factors of type \(C\) or \(F\), then Peterson translation of coconvex sets preserves freeness.