Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2022

Publication Title

International Mathematics Research Notices

Abstract

Webs are planar graphs with boundary that describe morphisms in a diagrammatic representation category for 𝔰𝔩k ⁠. They are studied extensively by knot theorists because braiding maps provide a categorical way to express link diagrams in terms of webs, producing quantum invariants like the well-known Jones polynomial. One important question in representation theory is to identify the relationships between different bases; coefficients in the change-of-basis matrix often describe combinatorial, algebraic, or geometric quantities (e.g., Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials). By ”flattening” the braiding maps, webs can also be viewed as the basis elements of a symmetric group representation. In this paper, we define two new combinatorial structures for webs: band diagrams and their one-dimensional projections, shadows, which measure depths of regions inside the web. As an application, we resolve an open conjecture that the change of basis between the so-called Specht basis and web basis of this symmetric group representation is unitriangular for 𝔰𝔩3 -webs ([ 33] and [ 29].) We do this using band diagrams and shadows to construct a new partial order on webs that is a refinement of the usual partial order. In fact, we prove that for 𝔰𝔩2 -webs, our new partial order coincides with the tableau partial order on webs studied by the authors and others [ 12, 17, 29, 33]. We also prove that though the new partial order for 𝔰𝔩3 -webs is a refinement of the previously studied tableau order, the two partial orders do not agree for 𝔰𝔩3 ⁠.

Volume

2022

Issue

5

First Page

3371

Last Page

3416

DOI

10.1093/imrn/rnaa290

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.

Comments

Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.

Included in

Mathematics Commons

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