Refined cyclic sieving on words for the major index statistic

Abstract

Reiner–Stanton–White (Reiner et al., 2004) defined the cyclic sieving phenomenon (CSP) associated to a finite cyclic group action and a polynomial. A key example arises from the length generating function for minimal length coset representatives of a parabolic quotient of a finite Coxeter group. In type A, this result can be phrased in terms of the natural cyclic action on words of fixed content.There is a natural notion of refinement for many CSP’s. We formulate and prove a refinement, with respect to the major index statistic, of this CSP on words of fixed content by also fixing the cyclic descent type. The argument presented is completely different from Reiner–Stanton–White’s representation-theoretic approach. It is combinatorial and largely, though not entirely, bijective in a sense we make precise with a “universal” sieving statistic on words, flex.A building block of our argument involves cyclic sieving for shifted subset sums, which also appeared in Reiner–Stanton–White. We give an alternate, largely bijective proof of a refinement of this result by extending some ideas of Wagon–Wilf (Wagon and Wilf, 1994).