Skew Howe duality and limit shapes of Young diagrams

Abstract

AbstractWe consider the skew Howe duality for the action of certain dual pairs of Lie groups on the exterior algebra as a probability measure on Young diagrams by the decomposition into the sum of irreducible representations. We prove a combinatorial version of this skew Howe duality for the pairs , , , and using crystal bases, which allows us to interpret the skew Howe duality as a natural consequence of lattice paths on lozenge tilings of certain partial hexagonal domains. The ‐representation multiplicity is given as a determinant formula using the Lindström–Gessel–Viennot lemma and as a product formula. These admit natural ‐analogs that we show equals the ‐dimension of a ‐representation (up to an overall factor of ), giving a refined version of the combinatorial skew Howe duality. Using these product formulas (at ), we take the infinite rank limit and prove that the diagrams converge uniformly to the limit shape.