Demazure crystals and the Schur positivity of Catalan functions

Catalan functions, the graded Euler characteristics of certain vector bundles on the flag variety, are a rich class of symmetric functions which include \(k\)-Schur functions and parabolic Hall-Littlewood polynomials. We prove that Catalan functions indexed by partition weight are the characters of \(U_{q}(\widehat{\mathfrak{sl}}_{\ell })\)-generalized Demazure crystals as studied by Lakshmibai-Littelmann-Magyar and Naoi. We obtain Schur positive formulas for these functions, settling conjectures of Chen-Haiman and Shimozono-Weyman. Our approach more generally gives key positive formulas for graded Euler characteristics of certain vector bundles on Schubert varieties by matching them to characters of generalized Demazure crystals.