Schur positivity of the nabla operator on two-column modified Hall--Littlewood polynomials

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the Schur positivity of modified Hall--Littlewood polynomials indexed by two-column partitions under the action of the $\nabla$ operator. Specifically, we resolve two conjectures posed by Bergeron, Garsia, Haiman, and Tesler in the two-column case. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates that these results can be extended to arbitrary powers $\nabla^k$ for all integers $k\geq 1$.