The purity of set-systems related to Grassmann necklaces

Abstract

Studying the problem of quasicommuting quantum minors, Leclerc and Zelevinsky introduced in 1998 the notion of weakly separated sets in $[n]:=\{1,\ldots, n\}$. Moreover, they raised several conjectures on the purity for this symmetric relation, in particular, on the Boolean cube $2^{[n]}$. In 0909.1423[math.CO] we proved these purity conjectures for the Boolean cube $2^{[n]}$, the discrete Grassmanian $\binom{[n]}{r}$, and some other set-systems. Oh, Postnikov, and Speyer in arxiv:1109.4434 proved the purity for weakly separated collections inside a positroid which contain a Grassmann necklace $\mathcal {N}$ defining the positroid. We denote such set-systems as $\mathcal{Int}(\mathcal {N} )$. In this paper we give an alternative (and shorter) proof of the purity of $\mathcal{Int}(\mathcal {N} )$ and present a stronger result. More precisely, we introduce a set-system $\mathcal{Out}(\mathcal {N} )$ complementary to $\mathcal{Int}(\mathcal {N })$, in a sense, and establish its purity. Moreover, we prove (Theorem~3) that these two set-systems are weakly separated from each other. As a consequence of Theorem~3, we obtain the purity of set-systems related to pairs of weakly separated necklaces (Proposition 4 and Corollaries 1 and 2). Finally, we raise a conjecture on the purity of both the interior and exterior of a generalized necklace.

Keywords

• set systems
• grassmann necklaces
• [info.info-dm] computer science [cs]/discrete mathematics [cs.dm]
• [math.math-co] mathematics [math]/combinatorics [math.co]