Involution words II: braid relations and atomic structures

Involution words are variations of reduced words for twisted involutions in Coxeter groups. They arise naturally in the study of the Bruhat order, of certain Iwahori–Hecke algebra modules, and of orbit closures in flag varieties. Specifically, to any twisted involutions x, y in a Coxeter group W with automorphism ∗ , we associate a set of involution words R^ _∗(x, y). This set is the disjoint union of the reduced words of a set of group elements A_∗(x, y) , which we call the atoms of y relative to x. The atoms, in turn, are contained in a larger set B_∗(x, y) ⊂ W with a similar definition, whose elements are referred to as Hecke atoms. Our main results concern some interesting properties of the sets R^ _∗(x, y) and A_∗(x, y) ⊂ B_∗(x, y). For finite Coxeter groups, we prove that A_∗(1 , y) consists of exactly the minimal-length elements w∈ W such that w^∗y≤ w in Bruhat order, and we conjecture a more general property for arbitrary Coxeter groups. In type A, we describe a simple set of conditions characterizing the sets A_∗(x, y) for all involutions x, y∈ S_n, giving a common generalization of three recent theorems of Can et al. We show that the atoms of a fixed involution in the symmetric group (relative to x= 1) naturally form a graded poset, while the Hecke atoms surprisingly form an equivalence class under the “Chinese relation” studied by Cassaigne et al. These facts allow us to recover a recent theorem of Hu and Zhang describing a set of “braid relations” spanning the involution words of any self-inverse permutation. We prove a generalization of this result giving an analogue of Matsumoto’s theorem for involution words in arbitrary Coxeter groups.