Shuffles of permutations and the Kronecker product

The Kronecker product of two homogeneous symmetric polynomialsP ₁,P ₂ is defined by means of the Frobenius map by the formulaP ₁oP ₂=F(F ⁻¹ P ₁)(F ⁻¹ P ₂). WhenP ₁ andP ₂ are the Schur functionsS _I ,S _J then the resulting productS _I oS _J is the Frobenius characteristic of the tensor product of the two representations corresponding to the diagramsI andJ. Taking the scalar product ofS _I oS _J with a third Schur functionsS _K gives the so called Kronecker coefficientc _I,J,K =<S _I oS _J ,S _K >. In recent work lascoux 7] and Gessel 3] have given what appear to be two separate combinatorial interpretations for thec _I,J,K in terms of some classes of permutations. In Lascoux's workI andJ are restricted to be hooks and in Gessel's both have to be zigzag partitions. In this paper we give a general result relating shuffles of permutations and Kronecker products. This leads us to a combinatorial interpretation of <S _I oS _J ,S _K > forS _I a product of homogeneous symmetric functions andJ, K unrestricted skew shapes. We also show how Gessel's and Lascoux's results are related and show how they can be derived from a special case of our result. Work supported by NSF grant at the University of California, San Diego.