Root games on Grassmannians

From MaRDI portal



Abstract: We recall the root game, introduced in an earlier paper, which gives a fairly powerful sufficient condition for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on a generalised flag manifold G/B. We show that it gives a necessary and sufficient rule for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on Grassmannians. In particular, a Littlewood-Richardson number is non-zero if and only if it is possible to win the corresponding root game. More generally, the rule can be used to determine whether or not a product of several Schubert classes on Gr_l(n) is non-zero in a manifestly symmetric way. Finally, we give a geometric interpretation of root games for Grassmannian Schubert problems.


The \textit{root game} was introduced by the author in his previous paper \textit{K.~Purbhoo} [Int. Math. Res. Not. 24590, 1--38 (2006; Zbl 1129.14073)]. It is a combinatorial procedure that can be used to determine whether the product of several Schubert cycles in a generalized flag variety \(G/B\) is non-zero. However, it only gives a sufficient condition for non-vanishing of such a product; it is still not proved whether this condition is necessary. In this paper, the author considers the case of Grassmann varieties. The structure constants of the cohomology ring of a Grassmannian in the Schubert basis are called Littlewood-Richardson numbers. Computing these numbers is a classical, but quite involved problem. The root game can be used to find out whether a Littlewood-Richardson number does not vanish. Even more generally, this procedure allows to say whether the product of an arbitrary number of Schubert cycles is non-zero. The main result of this paper states that in this particular case the condition provided by the root game is necessary and sufficient. One of the advantages of this approach is that it is manifestly symmetric: it is immediately clear from the definitions that reordering of the input Schubert cycles does not affect the result of the root game.











This page was built for publication: Root games on Grassmannians

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q883145)