Flows on Rooted Trees and the Menous-Novelli-Thibon Idempotents

Abstract

Several generating series for flows on rooted trees are introduced, as elements in the group of series associated with the Pre-Lie operad. By combinatorial arguments, one proves identities that characterise these series. One then gives a complete description of the image of these series in the group of series associated with the Dendriform operad. This allows to recover the Lie idempotents in the descent algebras recently introduced by Menous, Novelli and Thibon. Moreover, one defines new Lie idempotents and conjecture the existence of some others.