Shadows in the Wild - Folded Galleries and Their Applications

This survey is about combinatorial objects related to reflection groups and their applications in representation theory and arithmetic geometry. Coxeter groups and folded galleries in Coxeter complexes are introduced in detail and illustrated by examples. Further it is explained how they relate to retractions in Bruhat-Tits buildings and to the geometry of affine flag varieties and affine Grassmannians. The goal is to make these topics accessible to a wide audience.

Folding-like techniques for CAT(0) cube complexes

In a seminal paper, Stallings introduced folding of morphisms of graphs. One consequence of folding is the representation of finitely-generated subgroups of a finite-rank free group as immersions of finite graphs. Stallings’s methods allow one to construct this representation algorithmically, giving effective, algorithmic answers and proofs to classical questions about subgroups of free groups. Recently Dani–Levcovitz used Stallings-like methods to study subgroups of right-angled Coxeter groups, which act geometrically on CAT(0) cube complexes. In this paper we extend their techniques to fundamental groups of non-positively curved cube complexes.

Completely positive maps for imprimitive complex reflection groups

In 1994, M. Bożejko and R. Speicher proved the existence of completely positive quasimultiplicative maps from the group algebra of Coxeter groups to the set of bounded operators. They used some of them to define an inner product associated to creation and annihilation operators on a direct sum of Hilbert space tensor powers called full Fock space. Afterwards, A. Mathas and R. Orellana defined in 2008 a length function on imprimitive complex reflection groups that allowed them to introduce an analogue to the descent algebra of Coxeter groups. In this article, we use the length function defined by A. Mathas and R. Orellana to extend the result of M. Bożejko and R. Speicher to imprimitive complex reflection groups, in other words to prove the existence of completely positive quasimultiplicative maps from the group algebra of imprimitive complex reflection groups to the set of bounded operators. Some of those maps are then used to define a more general inner product associated to creation and annihilation operators on the full Fock space. Recall that in quantum mechanics, the state of a physical system is represented by a vector in a Hilbert space, and the creation and annihilation operators act on a Fock state by respectively adding and removing a particle in the ascribed quantum state.

On the Joint Distribution of Descents and Signs of Permutations

We study the joint distribution of descents and sign for elements of the symmetric group and the hyperoctahedral group (Coxeter groups of types $A$ and $B$). For both groups, this has an application to riffle shuffling: for large decks of cards the sign is close to random after a single shuffle. In both groups, we derive generating functions for the Eulerian distribution refined according to sign, and use them to give two proofs of central limit theorems for positive and negative Eulerian numbers.

Counting Parabolic Double Cosets in Symmetric Groups

Billey, Konvalinka, Petersen, Solfstra, and Tenner recently presented a method for counting parabolic double cosets in Coxeter groups, and used it to compute $p_n$, the number of parabolic double cosets in $S_n$, for $n\leq13$. In this paper, we derive a new formula for $p_n$ and an efficient polynomial time algorithm for evaluating this formula. We use these results to compute $p_n$ for $n\leq5000$ and to prove an asymptotic formula for $p_n$ that was conjectured by Billey et al.