Asymptotics of higher Lie characters

Abstract

Higher Lie characters form a distinguished family of symmetric group characters, which appear in many areas of algebra and combinatorics. An old open problem of Thrall is to decompose them into irreducibles. We propose a novel asymptotic approach to this problem, showing that many families of higher Lie characters tend to be proportional to the regular character. In particular, a random higher Lie character tends, in probability, to be proportional to the regular character.