Tableaux and orbit harmonics quotients for finite transformation monoids

Abstract: We extend Grood's tableau construction of irreducible representations of the rook monoid and Steinberg's analogous result for the full transformation monoid. Our approach is characteristic-free and applies to any submonoid $\mathcal{M}(n)$ of the partial transformation monoid on an $n$-element set that contains the symmetric group. To achieve this, we introduce and study a functor from the category of rational representations of the monoid of $n \times n$ matrices to the category of finite dimensional representations of $\mathcal{M}(n)$. We establish two branching rules. Our main results describe graded module structures of orbit harmonics quotients for the rook, partial transformation, and full transformation monoids. This yields analogs of the Cauchy decomposition for polynomial rings in $n\times n$ variables.