Jeu de taquin dynamics on infinite Young tableaux and second class particles

Abstract

We study an infinite version of the “jeu de taquin” sliding game, which can be thought of as a natural measure-preserving transformation on the set of infinite Young tableaux equipped with the Plancherel probability measure. We use methods from representation theory to show that the Robinson–Schensted–Knuth (RSK) algorithm gives an isomorphism between this measure-preserving dynamical system and the one-sided shift dynamics on a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables distributed uniformly on the unit interval. We also show that the jeu de taquin paths induced by the transformation are asymptotically straight lines emanating from the origin in a random direction whose distribution is computed explicitly, and show that this result can be interpreted as a statement on the limiting speed of a second-class particle in the Plancherel-TASEP particle system (a variant of the Totally Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process associated with Plancherel growth), in analogy with earlier results for second class particles in the ordinary TASEP.