Up- and Down-Operators on Young's Lattice

Abstract

The up-operators $u_i$ and down-operators $d_i$ (introduced as Schur operators by Fomin) act on partitions by adding/removing a box to/from the $i$th column if possible. It is well known that the $u_i$ alone satisfy the relations of the (local) plactic monoid, and the present authors recently showed that relations of degree at most 4 suffice to describe all relations between the up-operators. Here we characterize the algebra generated by the up- and down-operators together, showing that it can be presented using only quadratic relations.