Some combinatorial results involving Young diagrams

Abstract

In the first half of this paper we introduce a new method of examining the q-hook structure of a Young diagram, and use it to prove most of the standard results about q-cores and q-quotients. In particular, we give a quick new proof of Chung's Conjecture (2), which determines the number of diagrams with a given q-weight and says how many of them are q-regular. In the case where q is prime, this tells us how many ordinary and q-modular irreducible representations of the symmetric group there are in a given q-block. None of the results of section 2 is original. In the next section we give a new definition, the p-power diagram, which is closely connected with the p-quotient. This concept is interesting because when p is prime a condition involving the p-power diagram appears to be a necessary and sufficient criterion for the diagram to be p-regular and the corresponding ordinary irreducible representation of to remain irreducible modulo p. In this paper we derive combinatorial results involving the p-power diagram, and in a later article we investigate the relevant representation theory.