Combinatorial Hopf Algebras, Noncommutative Hall-littlewood Functions, and Permutation Tableaux

We introduce a new family of noncommutative analogs of the HallLittlewood symmetric functions. Our construction relies upon Tevlin’s bases and simple q-deformations of the classical combinatorial Hopf algebras. We connect our new Hall-Littlewood functions to permutation tableaux, and also give an exact formula for the q-enumeration of permutation tableaux of a fixed shape. This gives an explicit formula for: the steady state probability of each state in the partially asymmetric exclusion process; the polynomial enumerating permutations with a fixed set of weak excedances according to crossings; the polynomial enumerating permutations with a fixed set of descent bottoms according to occurrences of the generalized pattern 2− 31.