Euler obstructions for the Lagrangian Grassmannian

Abstract: We prove a case of a positivity conjecture of Mihalcea-Singh, concerned with the local Euler obstructions associated to the Schubert stratification of the Lagrangian Grassmannian LG(n,2n). Combined with work of Aluffi-Mihalcea-Sch\"urmann-Su, this further implies the positivity of the Mather classes for Schubert varieties in LG(n,2n), which Mihalcea-Singh had verified for the other cominuscule spaces of classical Lie type. Building on the work of Boe and Fu, we give a positive recursion for the local Euler obstructions, and use it to show that they provide a positive count of admissible labelings of certain trees, analogous to the ones describing Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials. Unlike in the case of the Grassmannians in types A and D, for LG(n,2n) the Euler obstructions e_{y,w} may vanish for certain pairs (y,w) with y <= w in the Bruhat order. Our combinatorial description allows us to classify all the pairs (y,w) for which e_{y,w}=0. Restricting to the big opposite cell in LG(n,2n), which is naturally identified with the space of n x n symmetric matrices, we recover the formulas for the local Euler obstructions associated with the matrix rank stratification.