Puzzle Ideals for Grassmannians

Abstract: Puzzles are a versatile combinatorial tool to interpret the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients for Grassmannians. In this paper, we propose the concept of puzzle ideals whose varieties one-one correspond to the tilings of puzzles and present an algebraic framework to construct the puzzle ideals which works with the Knutson-Tao-Woodward puzzle and its $T$-equivariant and $K$-theoretic variants for Grassmannians. For puzzles for which one side is free, we propose the side-free puzzle ideals whose varieties one-one correspond to the tilings of side-free puzzles, and the elimination ideals of the side-free puzzle ideals contain all the information of the structure constants for Grassmannians with respect to the free side. Besides the underlying algebraic importance of the introduction of these puzzle ideals is the computational feasibility to find all the tilings of the puzzles for Grassmannians by solving the defining polynomial systems, demonstrated with illustrative puzzles via computation of Gr\"obner bases.