On Orbits of Order Ideals of Minuscule Posets II: Homomesy

Abstract: The Fon-Der-Flaass action partitions the order ideals of a poset into disjoint orbits. For a product of two chains, Propp and Roby observed --- across orbits --- the mean cardinality of the order ideals within an orbit to be invariant. That this phenomenon, which they christened homomesy, extends to all minuscule posets is shown herein. Given a minuscule poset $P$, there exists a complex simple Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ and a representation $V$ of $\mathfrak{g}$ such that the lattice of order ideals of $P$ coincides with the weight lattice of $V$. For a weight $\mu$ with corresponding order ideal $I$, it is demonstrated that the behavior of the Weyl group simple reflections on $\mu$ not only uniquely determines $\mu$, but also encodes the cardinality of $I$. After recourse to work of Rush and Shi mapping the anatomy of the lattice isomorphism, the upshot is a uniform proof that the cardinality statistic exhibits homomesy. A further application of these ideas shows that the statistic tracking the number of maximal elements in an order ideal is also homomesic, extending another result of Propp and Roby.