Stability of stretched root systems, root posets, and shards

Abstract

Inspired by the infinite families of finite and affine root systems, we consider a "stretching" operation on general crystallographic root systems which, on the level of Coxeter diagrams, replaces a vertex with a path of unlabeled edges. We embed a root system into its stretched versions using a similar operation on individual roots. For a fixed root, we study the growth of two associated structures as we lengthen the stretched path: the downset in the root poset (in the sense of Bj\"orner and Brenti [3]) and the arrangement of shards, introduced by Nathan Reading. We show that both eventually admit a uniform description, and deduce enumerative consequences: the size of the downset is eventually a polynomial, and the number of shards grows exponentially.