Bounded Littlewood Identities with Fixed Number of Odd Rows or Odd Columns

Abstract

A Littlewood identity is an identity equating a sum of Schur functions with an infinite product. A bounded Littlewood identity is one where the sum is taken over the partitions with a bounded number of rows or columns. The price to pay is that the infinite product has to be replaced by a determinant. The focus of this article is on refinements of such bounded Littlewood identities where one also prescribes the number of odd-length rows or columns of the partitions. Goulden [Discrete Math. 99 (1992), 69-77] had given such a refinement in which the number of columns is bounded and the number of odd-length rows is prescribed. We provide refinements where the number of columns is bounded and the number of odd-length columns is prescribed. Furthermore, we present new formulations of such bounded Littlewood identities involving skewing operators. As corollaries we obtain non-standard formulas for numbers of standard Young tableaux with restricted shapes as above. In the last part of the article we discuss combinatorial interpretations of such identities in terms of up-down tableaux. As corollaries, we obtain identities between numbers of standard Young tableaux and numbers of (marked) vacillating tableaux.