EW-tableaux, Le-tableaux, tree-like tableaux and the abelian sandpile model (Q1658751)

Summary: A EW-tableau is a certain 0/1-filling of a Ferrers diagram, corresponding uniquely to an acyclic orientation, with a unique sink, of a certain bipartite graph called a Ferrers graph. We give a bijective proof of a result of \textit{R. Ehrenborg} and \textit{S. van Willigenburg} [Discrete Comput. Geom. 32, No. 4, 481--492 (2004; Zbl 1055.05151)] showing that EW-tableaux of a given shape are equinumerous with permutations with a given set of excedances. This leads to an explicit bijection between EW-tableaux and the much studied Le-tableaux, as well as the tree-like tableaux introduced by \textit{J.-C. Aval} et al. [in: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on formal power series and algebraic combinatorics, FPSAC 2011, Reykjavik, Iceland, June 13--17, 2011. Nancy: The Association. Discrete Mathematics \& Theoretical Computer Science (DMTCS). 63--74 (2011; Zbl 1355.05044)]. We show that the set of EW-tableaux on a given Ferrers diagram are in 1-1 correspondence with the minimal recurrent configurations of the abelian sandpile model on the corresponding Ferrers graph. Another bijection between EW-tableaux and tree-like tableaux, via spanning trees on the corresponding Ferrers graphs, connects the tree-like tableaux to the minimal recurrent configurations of the abelian sandpile model on these graphs. We introduce a variation on the EW-tableaux, which we call NEW-tableaux, and present bijections from these to Le-tableaux and tree-like tableaux. We also present results on various properties of and statistics on EW-tableaux and NEW-tableaux, as well as some open problems on these.