The Equations Defining Affine Grassmannians in Type A and a Conjecture of Kreiman, Lakshmibai, Magyar, and Weyman

The affine Grassmannian of $SL_n$ admits an embedding into the Sato Grassmannian, which further admits a Plücker embedding into the projectivization of Fermion Fock space. Kreiman, Lakshmibai, Magyar, and Weyman describe the linear part of the ideal defining this embedding in terms of certain elements of the dual of Fock space called shuffles, and they conjecture that these elements together with the Plücker relations suffice to cut out the affine Grassmannian. We give a proof of this conjecture in two steps; first, we reinterpret the shuffle equations in terms of Frobenius twists of symmetric functions. Using this, we reduce to a finite-dimensional problem, which we solve. For the 2nd step, we introduce a finite-dimensional analogue of the affine Grassmannian of $SL_n$, which we conjecture to be precisely the reduced subscheme of a finite-dimensional Grassmannian consisting of subspaces invariant under a nilpotent operator.