A recurrence formula for Jack connection coefficients

Abstract: This article is devoted to the study of Jack connection coefficients, a generalization of the connection coefficients of the classical commutative subalgebras of the group algebra of the symmetric group closely related to the theory of Jack symmetric functions. First introduced by Goulden and Jackson (1996) these numbers indexed by three partitions of a given integer $n$ and the Jack parameter $\alpha$ are defined as the coefficients in the power sum expansion of the Cauchy sum for Jack symmetric functions. While very little is known about them, examples of computations for small values of $n$ tend to show that the nice properties of the special cases $\alpha =1$ (connection coefficients of the class algebra) and $\alpha = 2$ (connection coefficients of the double coset algebra) extend to general $\alpha$. Goulden and Jackson conjectured that Jack connection coefficients are polynomials in $\beta = \alpha-1$ with non negative integer coefficients given by some statistics on matchings on a set of $2n$ elements, the so called Matchings-Jack conjecture. In this paper we look at the case when two of the integer partitions are equal to the single part $(n)$ and use a framework by Lasalle (2008) for Jack symmetric functions to show that the coefficients satisfy a simple recurrence formula that makes their computation very effective and allow a better understanding of their properties. In particular we prove the Matchings-Jack conjecture in this case. Furthermore, we provide a bijective proof of the recurrence formula for $\alpha \in {1,2}$ using the combinatorial interpretation of the coefficients for these specific values of the Jack parameter. Finally we exhibit the polynomial properties of more general coefficients where the two single part partitions are replaced by an arbitrary number of integer partitions either equal to $(n)$ or $[1^{n-2}2]$.