Ghost Kohnert posets

Abstract

Recently, Pan and Yu showed that Lascoux polynomials can be defined in terms of certain collections of diagrams consisting of unit cells arranged in the first quadrant. Starting from certain initial diagrams, one forms a finite set of diagrams by applying two types of moves: Kohnert and ghost moves. Both moves cause at most one cell to move to a lower row with ghost moves leaving a new "ghost cell" in its place. Each diagram formed in this way defines a monomial in the associated Lascoux polynomial. Restricting attention to diagrams formed by applying sequences of only Kohnert moves in the definition of Lascoux polynomials, one obtains the family of key polynomials. Recent articles have considered a poset structure on the collections of diagrams formed when one uses only Kohnert moves. In general, these posets are not "well-behaved," not usually having desirable poset properties. Here, as an intermediate step to studying the analogous posets associated with Lascoux polynomials, we consider the posets formed by restricting attention to those diagrams formed by using only ghost moves. Unlike in the case of Kohnert posets, we show that such "ghost Kohnert posets" are always ranked join semi-lattices. In addition, we establish a necessary condition for when ghost Kohnert posets are bounded and, consequently, lattices.