Middle orders: all distributive lattices between weak and Bruhat

Abstract

For a given Coxeter group, we study distributive lattices called middle orders refining the weak order and refined by the Bruhat order. In type $A$, we construct such lattices indexed by binary trees using a direct bijection between permutations and lower sets of a certain partition of the root poset into rectangles. When the binary tree is a left-comb tree, we recover the middle order defined by Bouvel, Ferrari, and Tenner (2025). We study combinatorial properties of these lattices, and show they are the only distributive lattices between the weak and Bruhat orders in type $A$. For general Coxeter groups, we study middle orders on parabolic quotients and use these to generalize our construction in type $A$ to other Weyl groups, obtaining so-called ``minuscule middle orders''. We show that they are a subset of sorting orders defined by Armstrong (2009), and we give conjectural descriptions of all middle orders that are not minuscule.