• 1 Department of Mathematics [Univ California Davis]
• 2 Department of Mathematics [MIT]

There is a close connection between Demazure crystals and tensor products of Kirillov–Reshetikhin crystals. For example, certain Demazure crystals are isomorphic as classical crystals to tensor products of Kirillov–Reshetikhin crystals via a canonically chosen isomorphism. Here we show that this isomorphism intertwines the natural affine grading on Demazure crystals with a combinatorially defined energy function. As a consequence, we obtain a formula of the Demazure character in terms of the energy function, which has applications to nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials and $q$-deformed Whittaker functions.