Lyndon Words and Transition Matrices between Elementary, Homogeneous and Monomial Symmetric Functions

Abstract

Let $h_\lambda$, $e_\lambda$, and $m_\lambda$ denote the homogeneous symmetric function, the elementary symmetric function and the monomial symmetric function associated with the partition $\lambda$ respectively. We give combinatorial interpretations for the coefficients that arise in expanding $m_\lambda$ in terms of homogeneous symmetric functions and the elementary symmetric functions. Such coefficients are interpreted in terms of certain classes of bi-brick permutations. The theory of Lyndon words is shown to play an important role in our interpretations.