Vanishing integrals for Hall-Littlewood polynomials

Vidya Venkateswaran

Published 2010-11-22, updated 2011-06-13Version 2

It is well known that if one integrates a Schur function indexed by a partition $\lambda$ over the symplectic (resp. orthogonal) group, the integral vanishes unless all parts of $\lambda$ have even multiplicity (resp. all parts of $\lambda$ are even). In a recent paper of Rains and Vazirani, Macdonald polynomial generalizations of these identities and several others were developed and proved using Hecke algebra techniques. However at $q=0$ (the Hall-Littlewood level), these approaches do not work, although one can obtain the results by taking the appropriate limit. In this paper, we develop a direct approach for dealing with this special case. This technique allows us to prove some identities that were not amenable to the Hecke algebra approach, as well as to explicitly control the nonzero values. Moreover, we are able to generalize some of the identities by introducing extra parameters. This leads us to a finite-dimensional analog of a recent result of Warnaar, which uses the Rogers-Szeg\"o polynomials to unify some existing summation type formulas for Hall-Littlewood functions.