Schröder combinatorics and -associahedra

Abstract: We study

u

-Schr"oder paths, which are Schr"oder paths which stay weakly above a given lattice path

u

. Some classical bijective and enumerative results are extended to the

u

-setting, including the relationship between small and large Schr"oder paths. We introduce two posets of

u

-Schr"oder objects, namely

u

-Schr"oder paths and trees, and show that they are isomorphic to the face poset of the

u

-associahedron

A_{u}

introduced by Ceballos, Padrol and Sarmiento. A consequence of our results is that the

i

-dimensional faces of

A_{u}

are indexed by

u

-Schr"oder paths with

i

diagonal steps, and we obtain a closed-form expression for these Schr"oder numbers in the special case when

u

is a `rational' lattice path. Using our new description of the face poset of

A_{u}

, we apply discrete Morse theory to show that

A_{u}

is contractible. This yields one of two proofs presented for the fact that the Euler characteristic of

A_{u}

is one. A second proof of this is obtained via a formula for the

u

-Narayana polynomial in terms of

u

-Schr"oder numbers.

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