Charge on tableaux and the poset of k-shapes

Abstract: A poset on a certain class of partitions known as k-shapes was recently introduced to provide a combinatorial rule for the expansion of a (k-1)-Schur functions into k-Schur functions at t=1. The main ingredient in this construction was a bijection, which we call the weak bijection, that associates to a k-tableau a pair made out of a (k-1)-tableau and a path in the poset of k-shapes. We define here a concept of charge on k-tableaux (which conjecturally gives a combinatorial interpretation for the expansion coefficients of Hall-Littlewood polynomials into k-Schur functions), and show that it is compatible in the standard case with the weak bijection. In particular, we obtain that the usual charge of a standard tableau of size n is equal to the sum of the charges of its corresponding paths in the poset of k-shapes, for k=2,3...n.