Affine Demazure crystals for specialized nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials

Abstract: We give a crystal-theoretic proof that nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials specialized to $t=0$ are affine Demazure characters. We explicitly construct an affine Demazure crystal on semistandard key tabloids such that removing the affine edges recovers the finite Demazure crystals constructed earlier by the authors. We also realize the filtration on highest weight modules by Demazure modules by defining explicit embedding operators which, at the level of characters, parallels the recursion operators of Knop and Sahi for specialized nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials. Thus we prove combinatorially in type A that every affine Demazure module admits a finite Demazure flag.