Young's lattice

In mathematics, Young's lattice is a lattice that is formed by all integer partitions. It is named after Alfred Young, who, in a series of papers On quantitative substitutional analysis, developed the representation theory of the symmetric group. In Young's theory, the objects now called Young diagrams and the partial order on them played a key, even decisive, role. Young's lattice prominently figures in algebraic combinatorics, forming the simplest example of a differential poset in the sense of . It is also closely connected with the crystal bases for affine Lie algebras. Young's lattice is a lattice (and hence also a partially ordered set) Y formed by all integer partitions ordered by inclusion of their Young diagrams (or Ferrers diagrams). The traditional application of Young's lattice is to the description of the irreducible representations of symmetric groups Sn for all n, together with their branching properties, in characteristic zero. The equivalence classes of irreducible representations may be parametrized by partitions or Young diagrams, the restriction from Sn +1 to Sn is multiplicity-free, and the representation of Sn with partition p is contained in the representation of Sn +1 with partition q if and only if q covers p in Young's lattice. Iterating this procedure, one arrives at Young's semicanonical basis in the irreducible representation of Sn with partition p, which is indexed by the standard Young tableaux of shape p. The poset Y is graded: the minimal element is ∅, the unique partition of zero, and the partitions of n have rank n. This means that given two partitions that are comparable in the lattice, their ranks are ordered in the same sense as the partitions, and there is at least one intermediate partition of each intermediate rank. The poset Y is a lattice. The meet and join of two partitions are given by the intersection and the union of the corresponding Young diagrams. Because it is a lattice in which the meet and join operations are represented by intersections and unions, it is a distributive lattice.