Free cumulants, Schröder trees, and operads

The functional equation defining the free cumulants in free probability is lifted successively to the noncommutative Faà di Bruno algebra, and then to the group of a free operad over Schröder trees. This leads to new combinatorial expressions, which remain valid for operator-valued free probability. Specializations of these expressions give back Speicher's formula in terms of noncrossing partitions, and its interpretation in terms of characters due to Ebrahimi-Fard and Patras.