Difference operators for partitions and some applications

Abstract: Motivated by the Nekrasov-Okounkov formula on hook lengths, the first author conjectured that the Plancherel average of the $2k$-th power sum of hook lengths of partitions with size $n$ is always a polynomial of $n$ for any $k\in \mathbb{N}$. This conjecture was generalized and proved by Stanley (Ramanujan J., 23(1--3): 91--105, 2010). In this paper, inspired by the work of Stanley and Olshanski on the differential poset of Young lattice, we study the properties of two kinds of difference operators $D$ and $D^-$ defined on functions of partitions. Even though the calculations for higher orders of $D$ are extremely complex, we prove that several well-known families of functions of partitions are annihilated by a power of the difference operator $D$. As an application, our results lead to several generalizations of classic results on partitions, including the marked hook formula, Stanley Theorem, Okada-Panova hook length formula, and Fujii-Kanno-Moriyama-Okada content formula. We insist that the Okada constants $K_r$ arise directly from the computation for a single partition $\lambda$, without the summation ranging over all partitions of size~$n$.