Dual immaculate creation operators and a dendriform algebra structure on the quasisymmetric functions

The dual immaculate functions are a basis of the ring QSym of quasisymmetric functions, and form one of the most natural analogues of the Schur functions. The dual immaculate function corresponding to a composition is a weighted generating function for immaculate tableaux in the same way as a Schur function is for semistandard Young tableaux; an “immaculate tableau” is defined similarly to a semistandard Young tableau, but the shape is a composition rather than a partition, and only the first column is required to strictly increase (whereas the other columns can be arbitrary; but each row has to weakly increase). Dual immaculate functions have been introduced by Berg, Bergeron, Saliola, Serrano and Zabrocki in arXiv:1208.5191, and have since been found to possess numerous nontrivial properties. In this note, we prove a conjecture of Mike Zabrocki which provides an alternative construction for the dual immaculate functions in terms of certain "vertex operators". The proof uses a dendriform structure on the ring QSym; we discuss the relation of this structure to known dendriform structures on the combinatorial Hopf algebras FQSym and WQSym.