Toric Heaps, Cyclic Reducibility, and Conjugacy in Coxeter Groups

Abstract

In 1986, G.X. Viennot introduced the theory of heaps of pieces as a visualization of Cartier and Foata’s “partially commutative monoids”. These are essentially labeled posets satisfying a few additional properties, and one natural setting where they arise is as models of reduced words in Coxeter groups. In this paper, we introduce a cyclic version of a heap, which loosely speaking, can be thought of as taking a heap and wrapping it into a cylinder. We call this object a toric heap, because we formalize it as a labeled toric poset, which is a cyclic version of an ordinary poset. Defining the category of toric heaps leads to the notion of certain morphisms such as toric extensions. We study toric heaps in Coxeter theory, because a cyclic shift of a reduced word is simply a conjugate by an initial or terminal generator. As such, we formalize and study a framework that we call cyclic reducibility in Coxeter theory, which is closely related to conjugacy. We introduce what it means for elements to be torically reduced, which is a stronger condition than simply being cyclically reduced. Along the way, we encounter a new class of elements that we call torically fully commutative (TFC), which are those that have a unique cyclic commutativity class, and comprise a strictly bigger class than the cyclically fully commutative (CFC) elements. We prove several cyclic analogues of results on fully commutative (FC) elements due to Stembridge. We conclude with how this framework fits into recent work in Coxeter groups, and we correct a minor flaw in a few recently published theorems.