On the support of the free Lie algebra: the Sch\"utzenberger problems

Abstract

M.-P. Sch\"utzenberger asked to determine the support of the free Lie algebra ${\mathcal L}_{{\mathbb Z}_{m}}(A)$ on a finite alphabet $A$ over the ring ${\mathbb Z}_{m}$ of integers $\bmod m$ and all the corresponding pairs of twin and anti-twin words, i.e., words that appear with equal (resp. opposite) coefficients in each Lie polynomial. We study these problems using the adjoint endomorphism $l^{*}$ of the left normed Lie bracketing $l$ of ${\mathcal L}_{{\mathbb Z}_{m}}(A)$. Calculating $l^{*}(w)$ via all factors of a given word $w$ of fixed length and the shuffle product, we recover the result of Duchamp and Thibon $(1989)$ for the support of the free Lie ring in a much more natural way. We rephrase these problems, for words of length $n$, in terms of the action of the left normed multi-linear Lie bracketing $l_{n}$ of ${\mathcal L}_{{\mathbb Z}_{m}}(A)$ - viewed as an element of the group ring of the symmetric group ${\mathcal S}_{n}$ - on $\lambda$-tabloids, where $\lambda$ is a partition of $n$. For words $w$ in two letters, represented by a subset $I$ of $[n] = \{1, 2, ..., n \}$, this leads us to the {\em Pascal descent polynomial} $p_{n}(I)$, a particular commutative multi-linear polynomial which equals to a signed binomial coefficient when $|I| = 1$ and allows us to obtain a sufficient condition on $n$ and $I$ in order that $w$ lies in ${\mathcal L}_{{\mathbb Z}_{m}}(A)$. We also have a particular conjecture for twin and anti-twin words for the free Lie ring and show that it is enough to be checked for $|A| = 2$.