The squared distance curvature is a kind of two-point curvature the sign of which turned out crucial for the smoothness of optimal transportation maps on Riemannian manifolds. Positivity properties of that new curvature have been established recently for all the simply connected compact rank one symmetric spaces, except the Cayley plane. Direct proofs were given for the sphere, an indirect one via the Hopf fibrations) for the complex and quaternionic projective spaces. Here, we present a direct proof of a property implying all the preceding ones, valid on every positively curved Riemannian locally symmetric space.

Let $K$ be a complex reductive algebraic group and $V$ a representation of $K$. Let $S$ denote the ring of polynomials on $V$. Assume that the action of $K$ on $S$ is multiplicity-free. If $\lambda$ denotes the isomorphism class of an irreducible representation of $K$, let $\rho_\lambda\from K \rightarrow GL(V_{\lambda})$ denote the corresponding irreducible representation and $S_\lambda$ the $\lambda$-isotypic component of $S$. Write $S_\lambda \cdot S_\mu$ for the subspace of $S$ spanned by products of $S_\lambda$ and $S_\mu$. If $V_\nu$ occurs as an irreducible constituent of $V_\lambda\otimes V_\mu$, is it true that $S_\nu\subseteq S_\lambda\cdot S_\mu$? In this paper, the authors investigate this question for representations arising in the context of Hermitian symmetric pairs. It is shown that the answer is yes in some cases and, using an earlier result of Ruitenburg, that in the remaining classical cases, the answer is yes provided that a conjecture of Stanley on the multiplication of Jack polynomials is true. It is also shown how the conjecture connects multiplication in the ring $S$ to the usual Littlewood--Richardson rule.