On certain spaces of lattice diagram determinants

The aim of this work is to study some lattice diagram determinants Δ_L(X,Y) as defined in (Adv. Math. 142 (1999) 244) and to extend results of Aval et al. (J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, to appear). We recall that M_L denotes the space of all partial derivatives of Δ_L. In this paper, we want to study the space M_i,j^k(X,Y) which is defined as the sum of M_L spaces where the lattice diagrams L are obtained by removing k cells from a given partition, these cells being in the “shadow” of a given cell (i,j) in a fixed Ferrers diagram. We obtain an upper bound for the dimension of the resulting space M_i,j^k(X,Y), that we conjecture to be optimal. This dimension is a multiple of n! and thus we obtain a generalization of the n! conjecture. Moreover, these upper bounds associated to nice properties of some special symmetric differential operators (the “shift” operators) allow us to construct explicit bases in the case of one set of variables, i.e. for the subspace M_i,j^k(X) consisting of elements of 0 Y-degree.