Cyclic sieving, promotion, and representation theory

Abstract

We prove a collection of conjectures of White [D. White, personal communication, 2007], as well as some related conjectures of Abuzzahab, Korson, Li, and Meyer [O. Abuzzahab, M. Korson, M. Li, S. Meyer, Cyclic and dihedral sieving for plane partitions, U. Minnesota REU Report, 2005] and of Reiner and White [V. Reiner, personal communication, 2007; D. White, personal communication, 2007], regarding the cyclic sieving phenomenon of Reiner, Stanton and White [V. Reiner, D. Stanton, D. White, The cyclic sieving phenomenon, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 108 (2004)] as it applies to jeu-de-taquin promotion on rectangular tableaux. To do this, we use Kazhdan–Lusztig theory and a characterization of the dual canonical basis of C [ x 11 , … , x n n ] due to Skandera [M. Skandera, On the dual canonical and Kazhdan–Lusztig bases and 3412, 4231-avoiding permutations, 2006, submitted for publication]. Afterwards, we extend our results to analyzing the fixed points of a dihedral action on rectangular tableaux generated by promotion and evacuation, suggesting a possible sieving phenomenon for dihedral groups. Finally, we give applications of this theory to cyclic sieving phenomena involving reduced words for the long elements of hyperoctohedral groups and noncrossing partitions.