Bijective proofs of character evaluations using trace forest of the jeu de taquin

Irreducible characters in the symmetric group are of special interest in combinatorics. They can be expressed either combinatorially with ribbon tableaux, or algebraically with contents. In this paper, these two expressions are related in a combinatorial way. We first introduce a fine structure in the famous jeu de taquin called "trace forest", with which we are able to count certain types of ribbon tableaux, leading to a simple bijective proof of a character evaluation formula in terms of contents that dates back to Frobenius (1901). Inspired by this proof, we give an inductive scheme that gives combinatorial proofs to more complicated formulae for characters in terms of contents.