On Quantum Immanants and the Cycle Basis of the Quantum Permutation Space

There are many combinatorial expressions for evaluating characters of the Hecke algebra of type A. However, with rare exceptions, they give simple results only for permutations that have minimal length in their conjugacy class. For other permutations, a recursive formula has to be applied. Consequently, quantum immanants are complicated objects when expressed in the standard basis of the quantum permutation space. In this paper, we introduce another natural basis of the quantum permutation space, and we prove that coefficients of quantum immanants in this basis are class functions.