Cacti, Toggles, and Reverse Plane Partitions

Abstract

The cactus group acts combinatorially on crystals via partial Sch\"utzenberger involutions. This action has been studied extensively in type $A$ and described via Bender-Knuth involutions. We prove an analogous result for the family of crystals $B(n\varpi_1)$ in type $D$. Our main tools are combinatorial toggles acting on reverse plane partitions of height $n$. As a corollary, we show that the length one and two subdiagram elements generate the full cactus action, addressing conjectures of Dranowski, the second author, Kamnitzer, and Morton-Ferguson.