Noncommutative symmetric functions .2. Transformations of alphabets

Noncommutative analogues of classical operations on symmetric functions are investigated, and applied to the description of idempotents and nilpotents in descent algebras. It is shown that any sequence of Lie idempotents (one in each descent algebra) gives rise to a complete set of indecomposable orthogonal idempotents of each descent algebra, and various deformations of the classical sequences of Lie idempotents are obtained. In particular, we obtain several g-analogues of the Eulerian idempotents and of the Garsia-Reutenauer idempotents.