Minuscule reverse plane partitions via quiver representations

Abstract: A nilpotent endomorphism of a quiver representation induces a linear transformation on the vector space at each vertex. Generically among all nilpotent endomorphisms, there is a well-defined Jordan form for these linear transformations, which is an interesting new invariant of a quiver representation. If $Q$ is a Dynkin quiver and $m$ is a minuscule vertex, we show that representations consisting of direct sums of indecomposable representations all including $m$ in their support, the category of which we denote by $\mathcal{C}{Q,m}$, are determined up to isomorphism by this invariant. We use this invariant to define a bijection from isomorphism classes of representations in $\mathcal{C}{Q,m}$ to reverse plane partitions whose shape is the minuscule poset corresponding to $Q$ and $m$. By relating the piecewise-linear promotion action on reverse plane partitions to Auslander-Reiten translation in the derived category, we give a uniform proof that the order of promotion equals the Coxeter number. In type $A_n$, we show that special cases of our bijection include the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth and Hillman-Grassl correspondences.