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 An and Bn. 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/WJ, where the WJ 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.