Promotion of increasing tableaux: frames and homomesies

Abstract: A key fact about M.-P. Sch\"{u}tzenberger's (1972) promotion operator on rectangular standard Young tableaux is that iterating promotion once per entry recovers the original tableau. For tableaux with strictly increasing rows and columns, H. Thomas and A. Yong (2009) introduced a theory of $K$-jeu de taquin with applications to $K$-theoretic Schubert calculus. The author (2014) studied a $K$-promotion operator $\mathcal{P}$ derived from this theory, but showed that the key fact does not generally extend to $K$-promotion of such increasing tableaux. Here we show that the key fact holds for labels on the boundary of the rectangle. That is, for $T$ a rectanglar increasing tableau with entries bounded by $q$, we have $\mathsf{Frame}(\mathcal{P}^q(T)) = \mathsf{Frame}(T)$, where $\mathsf{Frame}(U)$ denotes the restriction of $U$ to its first and last row and column. Using this fact, we obtain a family of homomesy results on the average value of certain statistics over $K$-promotion orbits, extending a $2$-row theorem of J. Bloom, D. Saracino, and the author (2016) to arbitrary rectangular shapes.