A Decomposition of the Descent Algebra of a Finite Coxeter Group

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First we aim to unify previous work by the first two authors, A. Garsia, and C. Reutenauer (see [2], [3], [4], [5] and [10]) on the structure of the descent algebras of the Coxeter groups of type A_n and B_n. But we shall also extend these results to the descent algebra of an arbitrary finite Coxeter group W. The descent algebra, introduced by Solomon in [14], is a subalgebra of the group algebra of W. It is closely related to the subring of the Burnside ring B(W) spanned by the permutation representations W/W_J, where the W_J are the parabolic subgroups of W. Specifically, our purpose is to lift a basis of primitive idempotents of the parabolic Burnside algebra to a basis of idempotents of the descent algebra.