The combinatorics of quiver representations

Abstract

We give a description of faces, of all codimensions, for the cones spanned by the set of weights associated to the rings of semi-invariants of quivers. For a triple flag quiver and its faces of codimension 1 this description reduces to the result of Knutson-Tao-Woodward on the facets of the Klyachko cone. We give new applications to Littlewood-Richardson coefficients, including a product formula for LR-coefficients corresponding to triples of partitions lying on a wall of the Klyachko cone. We systematically review and develop the necessary methods (exceptional and Schur sequences, orthogonal categories, semi-stable decompositions, GIT quotients for quivers). In an Appendix we include a variant of Belkale's geometric proof of a conjecture of Fulton that works for arbitrary quivers. © 2011 Association des Annales de l'institut Fourier.