Cyclic sieving, skew Macdonald polynomials and Schur positivity

Abstract

When $\lambda$ is a partition, the specialized non-symmetric Macdonald polynomial $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$ is symmetric and related to a modified Hall--Littlewood polynomial. We show that whenever all parts of the integer partition $\lambda$ is a multiple of $n$, the underlying set of fillings exhibit the cyclic sieving phenomenon (CSP) under a cyclic shift of the columns. The corresponding CSP polynomial is given by $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$. In addition, we prove a refined cyclic sieving phenomenon where the content of the fillings is fixed. This refinement is closely related to an earlier result by B.~Rhoades. We also introduce a skew version of $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$. We show that these are symmetric and Schur-positive via a variant of the Robinson--Schenstedt--Knuth correspondence and we also describe crystal raising- and lowering operators for the underlying fillings. Moreover, we show that the skew specialized non-symmetric Macdonald polynomials are in some cases vertical-strip LLT polynomials. As a consequence, we get a combinatorial Schur expansion of a new family of LLT polynomials.