Quantum Zonal Spherical Functions and Macdonald Polynomials

A unified theory of quantum symmetric pairs is applied to q-special functions. Previous work characterized certain left coideal subalgebras in the quantized enveloping algebra and established an appropriate framework for quantum zonal spherical functions. Here a distinguished family of such functions, invariant under the Weyl group associated to the restricted roots, is shown to be a family of Macdonald polynomials, as conjectured by Koornwinder and Macdonald. Our results place earlier work for Lie algebras of classical type in a general context and extend to the exceptional cases.