Schur-positive sets of permutations via products of grid classes

Abstract

Characterizing sets of permutations whose associated quasisymmetric function is symmetric and Schur-positive is a long-standing problem in algebraic combinatorics. In this paper we present a general method to construct Schur-positive sets and multisets, based on geometric grid classes and the product operation. Our approach produces many new instances of Schur-positive sets, and provides a broad framework that explains the existence of known such sets that until now were sporadic cases.