Schubert patches degenerate to subword complexes
Abstract
We study the intersections of general Schubert varieties Xw with permuted big cells, and give an inductive degeneration of each such "Schubert patch" to a Stanley-Reisner scheme. Similar results had been known for Schubert patches in various types of Grassmannians. We maintain reducedness using the results of [Knutson 2007] on automatically reduced degenerations, or through more standard cohomology-vanishing arguments. The underlying simplicial complex of the Stanley-Reisner scheme is a subword complex, as introduced for slightly different purposes in [Knutson-Miller 2004], and is homeomorphic to a ball. This gives a new proof of the Andersen-Jantzen-Soergel/Billey and Graham/Willems formulae for restrictions of equivariant Schubert classes to fixed points.