Standard Polytabloids are Independent
Now we’re all set to show that the polytabloids that come from standard tableaux are linearly independent. This is half of showing that they form a basis of our Specht modules. We’ll actually use a lemma that applies to any vector space with an ordered basis
. Here
indexes some set
of basis vectors which has some partial order
.
So, let be vectors in
, and suppose that for each
we can pick some basis vector
which shows up with a nonzero coefficient in
subject to the following two conditions. First, for each
the basis element
should be the maximum of all the basis vectors having nonzero coefficients in
. Second, the
are all distinct.
We should note that the first of these conditions actually places some restrictions on what vectors the can be in the first place. For each one, the collection of basis vectors with nonzero coefficients must have a maximum. That is, there must be some basis vector in the collection which is actually bigger (according to the partial order
) than all the others in the collection. It’s not sufficient for
to be maximal, which only means that there is no larger index in the collection. The difference is similar to that between local maxima and a global maximum for a real-valued function.
This distinction should be kept in mind, since now we’re going to shuffle the order of the so that
is maximal among the basis elements
. That is, none of the other
should be bigger than
, although some may be incomparable with it. Now I say that
cannot have a nonzero coefficient in any other of the
. Indeed, if it had a nonzero coefficient in, say,
, then by assumption we would have
, which contradicts the maximality of
. Thus in any linear combination
we must have , since there is no other way to cancel off all the occurrences of
. Removing
from the collection, we can repeat the reasoning with the remaining vectors until we get down to a single one, which is trivially independent.
So in the case we care about the space is the Young tabloid module , with the basis of Young tabloids having the dominance ordering. In particular, we consider for our
the collection of polytabloids
where
is a standard tableau. In this case, we know that
is the maximum of all the tabloids showing up as summands in
. And these standard tabloids are all distinct, since they arise from distinct standard tableaux. Thus our lemma shows that not only are the standard polytabloids
distinct, they are actually linearly independent vectors in
.
The Maximality of Standard Tableaux
Standard tableaux have a certain maximality property with respect to the dominance order on tabloids. Specifically, if is standard and
appears as a summand in the polytabloid
, then
.
Any such comes from
, where
. We will make our induction on the number of “column inversions” in
. That is, the number of pairs of entries
that are in the same column of
, but which are “out of order”, in the sense that
is in a lower row than
.
Given any such pair, the dominance lemma tells us that . That is, by “untwisting” the column inversion, we can move up the dominance order while preserving the columns. It should also be clear that
has fewer column inversions than
does. But if we undo all the column inversions, the tableau we’re left with must be standard. That is, it must be
itself.
The Dominance Lemma for Tabloids
If , and
appears in a lower row than
in the Young tabloid
, then
dominates
. That is, swapping two entries of
so as to move the lower number to a higher row moves the tabloid up in the dominance relations.
Let the composition sequences of and
be
and
, respectively. For
and
we automatically have
. For
there is a difference between the two: the entry
has been added in a different place. Let
and
be in rows
and
of
, respectively. In
, the entry
is added to row
, while in
it’s been added to row
. That is,
is the same as
with part
increased by one and part
decreased by one. Our assumption that
is in a lower row than
in
is that
. Therefore, since the lower row in
is less than in
, we find that
. And we conclude that
, as asserted.
The Dominance Order on Tabloids
Sorry, this should have gone up last Friday.
If is a Young tabloid with shape
, we can define tabloids
for each
from
to
by letting
be formed by the entries in
less than or equal to
. We define
to be the shape of
as a composition. For example, if we have
then we define
Along the way we see why we might want to consider a composition like with a zero part.
Anyway, now we define a dominance order on tabloids. If and
are two tabloids with composition sequences
and
, respectively, then we say
“dominates”
— and we write
— if
dominates
for all
.
As a (big!) example, we can write down the dominance order on all tabloids of shape :
It’s an exercise to verify that these are indeed all the tabloids with this shape. For each arrow, we can verify the dominance. As an example, let’s show that
First, let’s write down their composition sequences:
Now it should be easy to see on each row that . As another example, let’s try to compare
and
. Again, we write down their composition sequences:
We see that , but
. Thus neither tabloid dominates the other. The other examples to verify this diagram are all similarly straightforward.
Compositions
A “composition” is sort of like a partition, except the parts are allowed to come in any specified order. That is, a composition of is an ordered sequence of nonnegative integers
that sums up to
. Every partition is a composition — specifically one in which the sequence is nonincreasing. Since a general composition allows its parts to increase, it’s possible that some of the
are zero, which can’t really happen for partitions.
The notions of Ferrers diagrams and Young tableaux, and Young tabloids carry over right away to compositions. For instance, the Ferrers diagram of the composition is
and one possible Young tableau with this shape is
Now, it should be made clear that this is not a standard tableau, despite the fact that the rows and columns increase. The usual line is that we imagine the tableau to be at the upper-left corner of a quarter-plane, so there are cells extending out to the right and bottom of the diagram that aren’t part of the tableau. These, we say, are all filled with , and so the second column of this particular tableau is “actually”
, so it doesn’t actually increase after all. But as far as I can tell this is a lot of word salad designed to back up the definition we really want: the notion of standard Young tableaux only applies to partitions, not to compositions in general.
We can, however, extend the idea of the dominance order to general compositions. As usual we say that if
for all . We just don’t have to add up all the biggest parts first.
Standard Tableaux
So we’ve described the Specht modules, and we’ve shown that they give us a complete set of irreducible representations for the symmetric groups. But we haven’t described them very explicitly, and we certainl can’t say much about them. There’s still work to be done.
We say that a Young tableau is “standard” if its rows and columns are all increasing sequences. In this case, we also say that the Young tabloid
and the polytabloid
are standard.
Recall that we had a canonical Young tableau for each shape that listed the numbers from
to
in each row from top to bottom, as in
It should be clear that this canonical tableau is standard, so there is always at least one standard tableau for each shape. There may be more, of course. For example:
Clearly, any two distinct standard tableaux and
give rise to distinct tabloids
and
. Indeed, if
, then
and
would have to be row-equivalent. But only one Young tableau in any row-equivalence class has increasing rows, and only that one even has a chance to be standard. Thus if
and
are row-equivalent standard tableaux, they must be equal.
What’s not immediately clear is that the standard polytabloids and
are distinct. Further, it turns out that the collection of standard polytabloids
of shape
is actually independent, and furnishes a basis for the Specht module
. This is our next major goal.
Consequences of the Submodule Theorem
We have a number of immediate consequences of the submodule theorem. First, and most important, the Specht modules form a complete list of irreducible modules for the symmetric group . We know that they’re irreducible, and that there’s one of them for each partition
, which is the number of modules we’re looking for. But we need to show that the Specht modules corresponding to distinct partitions are themselves distinct. For this, we’ll use a lemma.
If is a nonzero intertwinor, then
. Further, if
, then
must be multiplication by a scalar. Indeed, since
there must be some polytabloid
with
. We decompose
, and extent
to all of
by sending every vector in
to
. That is:
where the are
-tableaux. Now, the
can’t all be zero, so we must have at least one
-tableau
so that
. But then our corollary of the sign lemma tells us that
, as we asserted!
Further, if , then our other corollary shows us that
for some scalar
. We can thus calculate
and so multiplies every vector by
.
As a consequence, the must be distinct for distinct permutations, since if
then there is a nonzero homomorphism
, and thus
. But the same argument shows that
, and thus
.
More particularly, we have a decomposition
where the diagonal multiplicities are . The rest of these multiplicities will eventually have a nice interpretation.
The Submodule Theorem
Sorry for the delay.
Let be a submodule of one of the Young tabloid modules. Then I say that either
contains the Specht module
, or it is contained in the orthogonal complement
. In particular, each Specht module
is irreducible, since any nontrivial submodule
cannot be contained in the orthogonal complement, and so it must also contain — and thus be equal to —
.
To see this, let be any vector, and let
be a
-tableau. Our last result showed us that
for some
. First, we’ll assume that there is some pair of
and
so that
. In this case,
. Since
generates all of
— the Specht modules are cyclic — we must have
.
On the other hand, what if there is no such pair of and
? That is,
for all vectors
and
-tableaux
. We can calculate
So each vector is orthogonal to each polytabloid
. Since the polytabloids span
, we must have
.
Corollaries of the Sign Lemma
The results we showed last time have a few immediate consequences we will have use of.
First, let and
are two Young tableaux of shapes
and
, respectively, where
and
. If
— where
is the group algebra element we’ve defined — then
dominates
.
To see this, let and
be two entries in the same row of
. They cannot be in the same column of
, since if they were then the swap
would be in the column-stabilizer
. Then we could conclude that
, which we assumed not to be the case. But if no two entries from the same row of
are in the same column of
, the dominance lemma tells us that
.
Now if it turns out that it’s not surprising that
. Luckily in that situation we can say something interesting:
Indeed, we must have for some
, basically by the same reasoning that led to the dominance lemma in the first place. Indeed, the thing that would obstruct finding such a
is having two entries in some column of
needing to go on the same row of
, which we know doesn’t happen. And so we calculate
Now if is any vector in the Specht module, and if
is a tableau of shape
, then
is some multiple of
. Indeed, we can write
were the are
-tableaux. For each one of these, we have
. Thus we find
which is a multiple of , as asserted.
The Sign Lemma
As we move towards proving the useful properties of Specht modules, we will find the following collection of results helpful. Through them all, let be a subgroup, and also consider the
-invariant inner product on
for which the distinct Young tabloids form an orthonormal basis.
First, if , then
where is the alternating sum of the elements of
. The proof basically runs the same as when we showed that
where
has shape
.
Next, for any vectors we have
Indeed, we can calculate
where we have used the facts that , and that as
runs over a group, so does
.
Next, if the swap , then we have the factorization
for some . To see this, consider the subgroup
, and pick a transversal. That is, write
as a disjoint union:
but then we can write the alternating sum
as we stated.
Finally, if is some tableau with
and
in the same row, and if the swap
, then
Our hypothesis tells us that . We can thus use the above factorization to write
