The symplectic plactic monoid, crystals, and MV cycles

Abstract

We study cells in generalised Bott-Samelson varieties for type C. These cells are parametrised by certain galleries in the affine building. We define a set of readable galleries - we show that the closure in the affine Grassmannian associated to a gallery in this set is an MV cycle. This then defines a map from the set of readable galeries to the set of MV cycles, which we show to be a morphism of crystals. We further compute the fibres of this map in terms of the Littelmann path model.