Demazure crystals for specialized nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials

Abstract: We give an explicit, nonnegative formula for the expansion of nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials specialized at $t=0$ in terms of Demazure characters. Our formula results from constructing Demazure crystals whose characters are the nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials, which also gives a new proof that these specialized nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials are positive graded sums of Demazure characters. Demazure crystals are certain truncations of classical crystals that give a combinatorial skeleton for Demazure modules. To prove our construction, we develop further properties of Demazure crystals, including an efficient algorithm for computing their characters from highest weight elements. As a corollary, we obtain a new formula for the Schur expansion of Hall--Littlewood polynomials in terms of a simple statistic on highest weight elements of our crystals.