Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, 93B.141 (2025), 12 pp.

Bruce E. Sagan and Alexander N. Wilson

Centralizers in the Plactic Monoid

Abstract. Let u be a word over the positive integers. Motivated in part by a question from representation theory, we study the centralizer set of u which is

C(u) = {w | uw is Knuth-equivalent to wu}.

In particular, we give various necessary conditions for w to be in C(u). We also characterize C(u) when u has few letters, when it has a single repeated entry, or when it is a certain type of decreasing sequence. We consider cn,m(u), the number of wC(u) of length n with max wm. We prove that for |u|=1 the value of this function depends only on the relative sizes of u and m and not on their actual values. And for various u we use Stanley's theory of poset partitions to show that, for fixed n, cn,m(u) is a polynomial in m with certain degree and leading coefficient. We end with various conjectures and directions for further research.


Received: November 15, 2024. Accepted: February 15, 2025. Final version: April 1, 2025.

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