Honeycombs from Hermitian Matrix Pairs

Knutson and Tao's work on the Horn conjectures used combinatorial invariants called hives and honeycombs to relate spectra of sums of Hermitian matrices to Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and problems in representation theory, but these relationships remained implicit. Here, let $M$ and $N$...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Glenn Appleby, Tamsen Whitehead
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science 2014-01-01
Series:Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dmtcs.episciences.org/2451/pdf
Description
Summary:Knutson and Tao's work on the Horn conjectures used combinatorial invariants called hives and honeycombs to relate spectra of sums of Hermitian matrices to Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and problems in representation theory, but these relationships remained implicit. Here, let $M$ and $N$ be two $n ×n$ Hermitian matrices. We will show how to determine a hive $\mathcal{H}(M, N)={H_ijk}$ using linear algebra constructions from this matrix pair. With this construction, one may also define an explicit Littlewood-Richardson filling (enumerated by the Littlewood-Richardson coefficient $c_μν ^λ$ associated to the matrix pair). We then relate rotations of orthonormal bases of eigenvectors of $M$ and $N$ to deformations of honeycombs (and hives), which we interpret in terms of the structure of crystal graphs and Littelmann's path operators. We find that the crystal structure is determined \emphmore simply from the perspective of rotations than that of path operators.
ISSN:1365-8050