Augmented Aztec bipyramid and dicube tilings (Q6056467)

A polycube is a connected solid figure in \(\mathbb R^3\) formed by combining unit cubes facet to facet. A dicube consists of two unit cubes attached along a facet. The authors consider the enumeration of dicube tilings, where each tiling represents a \(3\)-dimensional tessellation of a polycube using dicubes. In previous related research, the enumeration of domino tilings of polycubes, such as the Aztec diamond and the augmented Aztec diamond, was studied extensively. Here the authors focus on a three-dimensional analogue, the augmented Aztec bipyramid. This polycube consists of unit cubes and resembles a Platonic octahedron. In this paper, the authors discover a bijection between dicube tilings of the augmented Aztec bipyramid and \(3\)-dimensional Delannoy paths and use this correspondence to determine the number of dicube tilings of the augmented Aztec bipyramid. The main result of this paper is the following theorem. Theorem. The number of dicube tilings of the augmented Aztec bipyramid \(P_n\) of order \(n\) is given by \[ \sum_{k=0}^n \binom{n+k}{n-k}\binom{2k}{k}^2. \]