Ninth Variation of Classical Group Characters of Type A-D and Littlewood Identities

Abstract

We introduce certain generalisations of the characters of the classical Lie groups, extending the recently defined factorial characters of Foley and King. In this extension, the factorial powers are replaced with an arbitrary sequence of polynomials, as in Sergeev–Veselov's generalised Schur functions and Okada's generalised Schur P- and Q-functions. We also offer a similar generalisation for the rational Schur functions. We derive Littlewood-type identities for our generalisations. These identities allow us to give new (unflagged) Jacobi–Trudi identities for the Foley–King factorial characters and for rational versions of the factorial Schur functions. We also propose an extension of the original Macdonald's ninth variation of Schur functions to the case of symplectic and orthogonal characters, which helps us prove Nägelsbach–Kostka identities.