A crystal-like structure on shifted tableaux

Abstract: We introduce coplactic raising and lowering operators $E'_i$, $F'_i$, $E_i$, and $F_i$ on shifted skew semistandard tableaux. We show that the primed operators and unprimed operators each independently form type A Kashiwara crystals (but not Stembridge crystals) on the same underlying set and with the same weight functions. When taken together, the result is a new kind of `doubled crystal' structure that recovers the combinatorics of type B Schubert calculus: the highest-weight elements of our crystals are precisely the shifted Littlewood-Richardson tableaux, and their generating functions are the (skew) Schur Q functions.