Root games on Grassmannians

Abstract

We recall the root game, introduced in an earlier paper, which gives a fairly powerful sufficient condition for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on a generalised flag manifold G/B. We show that it gives a necessary and sufficient rule for non-vanishing of Schubert calculus on Grassmannians. In particular, a Littlewood-Richardson number is non-zero if and only if it is possible to win the corresponding root game. More generally, the rule can be used to determine whether or not a product of several Schubert classes on Gr_l(n) is non-zero in a manifestly symmetric way. Finally, we give a geometric interpretation of root games for Grassmannian Schubert problems.