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From orbital measures to Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and hive polytopes. (English) Zbl 1429.17009

Summary: The volume of the hive polytope (or polytope of honeycombs) associated with a Littlewood-Richardson coefficient of \(\mathrm{SU}(n)\), or with a given admissible triple of highest weights, is expressed, in the generic case, in terms of the Fourier transform of a convolution product of orbital measures. Several properties of this function – a function of three non-necessarily integral weights or of three multiplets of real eigenvalues for the associated Horn problem – are already known. In the integral case it can be thought of as a semi-classical approximation of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. We prove that it may be expressed as a local average of a finite number of such coefficients. We also relate this function to the Littlewood-Richardson polynomials (stretching polynomials) i.e. to the Ehrhart polynomials of the relevant hive polytopes. Several \(\mathrm{SU}(n)\) examples, for \(n = 2, 3,\ldots, 6\), are explicitly worked out.

MSC:

17B10 Representations of Lie algebras and Lie superalgebras, algebraic theory (weights)
22E46 Semisimple Lie groups and their representations
43A75 Harmonic analysis on specific compact groups
52B12 Special polytopes (linear programming, centrally symmetric, etc.)