Asymptotics of Plancherel measures for symmetric groups

Abstract

1.1. Plancherel measures. Given a finite group G, by the corresponding Plancherel measure we mean the probability measure on the set G∧ of irreducible representations of G which assigns to a representation π ∈ G∧ the weight (dim π)/|G|. For the symmetric group S(n), the set S(n)∧ is the set of partitions λ of the number n, which we shall identify with Young diagrams with n squares throughout this paper. The Plancherel measure on partitions λ arises naturally in representation– theoretic, combinatorial, and probabilistic problems. For example, the Plancherel distribution of the first part of a partition coincides with the distribution of the longest increasing subsequence of a uniformly distributed random permutation [31]. We denote the Plancherel measure on partitions of n by Mn,