An Involution on Semistandard Skyline Fillings

Abstract

Non-attacking skyline fillings were used by Haglund, Haiman and Loehr to establish a combinatorial formula for nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials. Semistandard skyline fillings are non-attacking skyline fillings with both major index and coinversion number equal to zero, which serve as a combinatorial model for key polynomials. In this paper, we construct an involution on semistandard skyline fillings. This involution can be viewed as a vast generalization of the classical Bender--Knuth involution. As an application, we obtain that semistandard skyline fillings are compatible with the Demazure operators, offering a new combinatorial proof that nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials specialize to key polynomials.