A characterization of bipartite Leonard pairs using the notion of a tail

Abstract: Let $V$ denote a vector space with finite positive dimension. We consider an ordered pair of linear transformations $A: V\rightarrow V$ and $A^*: V\rightarrow V$ that satisfy (i) and (ii) below. (i) There exists a basis for $V$ with respect to which the matrix representing $A$ is irreducible tridiagonal and the matrix representing $A^*$ is diagonal. (ii) There exists a basis for $V$ with respect to which the matrix representing $A^*$ is irreducible tridiagonal and the matrix representing $A$ is diagonal. We call such a pair a Leonard pair on $V$. Very roughly speaking, a Leonard pair is a linear algebraic abstraction of a $Q$-polynomial distance-regular graph. There is a well-known class of distance-regular graphs said to be bipartite and there is a related notion of a bipartite Leonard pair. Recently, M. S. Lang introduced the notion of a tail for bipartite distance-regular graphs, and there is an abstract version of this tail notion. Lang characterized the bipartite $Q$-polynomial distance-regular graphs using tails. In this paper, we obtain a similar characterization of the bipartite Leonard pairs using tails. Whereas Lang's arguments relied on the combinatorics of a distance-regular graph, our results are purely algebraic in nature.