Integration on complex Grassmannians, deformed monotone Hurwitz numbers, and interlacing phenomena

Abstract We introduce a family of polynomials, which arise in three distinct ways: in the large N expansion of a matrix integral, as a weighted enumeration of factorizations of permutations, and via the topological recursion. More explicitly, we interpret the complex Grassmannian $\mathrm {Gr}(M,N)$ as the space of $N \times N$ idempotent Hermitian matrices of rank M and develop a Weingarten calculus to integrate products of matrix elements over it. In the regime of large N and fixed ratio $\frac {M}{N}$ , such integrals have expansions whose coefficients count factorizations of permutations into monotone sequences of transpositions, with each sequence weighted by a monomial in $t = 1 - \frac {N}{M}$ . This gives rise to the desired polynomials, which specialise to the monotone Hurwitz numbers when $t = 1$ . These so-called deformed monotone Hurwitz numbers satisfy a cut-and-join recursion, a one-point recursion, and the topological recursion. Furthermore, we conjecture on the basis of overwhelming empirical evidence that the deformed monotone Hurwitz numbers are real-rooted polynomials whose roots satisfy remarkable interlacing phenomena. An outcome of our work is the viewpoint that the topological recursion can be used to “topologise” sequences of polynomials, and we claim that the resulting families of polynomials may possess interesting properties.