Kleber's conjecture and complementary products of symmetric functions

Abstract

We prove Kleber's rectangular-complement conjecture for Schur functions over an arbitrary commutative ring $R$, showing that, for a fixed rectangle, the products $s_λs_{λ^\vee}$, indexed by unordered complementary pairs, are linearly independent in $Λ_R$. The proof rests on a general independence theorem for componentwise splittings, which asserts that for every partition $θ$, the products $s_αs_β$ are linearly independent as $\{α,β\}$ ranges over unordered pairs of partitions satisfying $α+β=θ$. The independence of the products $s_λs_{λ^\vee}$ also yields linear independence of the Koike--Terada universal-character products over any field, answering a question of Gao--Orelowitz--Yong. We also prove the analogous result for monomial symmetric functions over fields of characteristic zero, as well as integral linear independence over $\mathbb{Z}$.