Positroid cluster structures from relabeled plabic graphs

Cluster algebras (13F60) Homogeneous spaces and generalizations (14M17) Gromov-Witten invariants, quantum cohomology, Gopakumar-Vafa invariants, Donaldson-Thomas invariants (algebro-geometric aspects) (14N35) Homology and cohomology of homogeneous spaces of Lie groups (57T15)

Abstract: The Grassmannian is a disjoint union of open positroid varieties

P_{v}

, certain smooth irreducible subvarieties whose definition is motivated by total positivity. The coordinate ring of

P_{v}

is a cluster algebra, and each reduced plabic graph

G

for

P_{v}

determines a cluster. We study the effect of relabeling the boundary vertices of

G

by a permutation

r

. Under suitable hypotheses on the permutation, we show that the relabeled graph

G^{r}

determines a cluster for a different open positroid variety

P_{w}

. As a key step of the proof, we show that

P_{v}

and

P_{w}

are isomorphic by a nontrivial twist isomorphism. Our constructions yield many cluster structures on each open positroid variety

P_{w}

, given by plabic graphs with appropriately relabeled boundary. We conjecture that the seeds in all of these cluster structures are related by a combination of mutations and Laurent monomial transformations involving frozen variables, and establish this conjecture for (open) Schubert and opposite Schubert varieties. As an application, we also show that for certain reduced plabic graphs

G

, the "source" cluster and the "target" cluster are related by mutation and Laurent monomial rescalings.

Review text

It is a bit difficult to write a review of a 44 pages long paper whose title already denounces its peculiar technical nature through the use of a jargon which directly addresses to specialists. The best that a reviewer can do, in such cases, is to attempt to give the potential interested reader some flavor of the employed vocabulary. The paper under review is genuinely combinatorial, but with a wider breath to other disciplines, notably algebraic geometry. The authors clearly explain its purpose: to investigate the coordinate rings of open positroid varieties in the Grassmannian, and various ways these coordinate rings can be identified with \textit{cluster algebras} whose initial \textit{seeds} are given by \textit{plabic} graphs with permuted boundary vertices. The most unusual word in the above sentence is ``plabic, resulting from the contraction of \textit{planar} and \textit{bicolored}. No need to explain what a Grassmannian is, because here the auhors refer to the honest classical algebraic variety parametrizing fixed dimension subspaces of a vector space. It is well known that Grasmannians provide the easiest example of \textit{cluster} varieties. Cluster varieties are so called because they are associated to cluster algebras. These latter were introduced by Fomin and Zelevinsky in three important articles published in between 2002 and 2007 [\textit{S. Fomin} and \textit{A. Zelevinsky}, J. Am. Math. Soc. 15, No. 2, 497--529 (2002; Zbl 1021.16017); Ann. Math. (2) 158, No. 3, 977--1018 (2003; Zbl 1057.52003); Compos. Math. 143, No. 1, 112--164 (2007; Zbl 1127.16023)]. These are suitable classes of commutative integral domains enriched with the action of distinguished subsets of finite cardinality, called clusters, which generate the algebra itself. The natural cells of a Grassmannian, attached to some complete flag, have cluster structures. \textit{Open positroid varieties} in \(G(k,n)\) are intersection of \(n\) Schubert cells, taken with respect to the cyclic rotations of the standard flag. They provide a stratification which stays in between the Richardson and the Gel'fand-Goreski-MacPherson-Serganova one. \textit{Positroid varieties} are closures of open positroid varieties. Furthermore, they are very concrete from a geometrical point of view, given that their scheme structure is defined by means of vanishing of Plücker coordinates. If \(G\) is a plabic graph for the top-dimensional positroid variety in \(G(k, n)\), one can produce, according to Scott, a ``source seed endowing the top-dimensional positroid variety in \(G(k, n)\) with a cluster structure, consisting of Plücker coordinates, with one cluster variable for each face of the graph \(G\). The first main result of the paper, Theorem 1.2, is about some equivalent conditions guaranting that open positroid varieties are isomorphic and a sharp description of the positive part of the open positroid variety determined by the given seed. The second main result shows that cluster transformations relates the target seeds of a plabic graph \(S\) with the plabic graph \(G_\rho\) obtained by \(S\) by relabeling it by a trip permutation \(\pi\) satisfying one of the equivalent conditions of Theorem 1.2 above. This interesting paper, of high mathematical level, concludes itself with a detailed reference list, very helpful to familiarize with the rather technical language which the paper has been written with, a task which is probably hard to be achieved through a purely informative review.

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