Cyclic descents for Motzkin paths

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Publication:6041572



Abstract: A notion of cyclic descents on standard Young tableaux (SYT) of rectangular shape was introduced by Rhoades, and extended to certain skew shapes by Adin, Elizalde and Roichman. The cyclic descent set restricts to the usual descent set when the largest value is ignored, and has the property that the number of SYT of a given shape with a given cyclic descent set D is invariant under cyclic shifts of the entries of D. Adin, Reiner and Roichman proved that a skew shape has a cyclic descent map if and only if it is not a connected ribbon. Unfortunately, their proof is nonconstructive. Recently Huang constructed an explicit cyclic descent map for all shapes where this is possible. In the earlier version of Adin, Elizalde and Roichman's paper, they asked to find statistics on combinatorial objects which are equidistributed with cyclic descents on SYT of given shapes. In this paper, we explicitly describe cyclic descent sets for Motzkin paths, which are equidistributed with cyclic descent sets of SYT for three-row shapes. Moreover, in light of Stanley's shuffling theorem, we give a bijective proof of the shuffling property of descent statistics for Motzkin paths.


Given a permutation \(\pi\) on \([n] := \{1, \dots, n\}\), there is a well-known notion of the descent set \(\mathsf{Des}(\pi)\), namely \[ \{i \in [n - 1] : \pi(i) > \pi(i + 1)\}. \] Note that \(n\) cannot be a descent of \(\pi\). The notion of cyclic descent introduced by \textit{P. Cellini} [Eur. J. Comb. 19, No. 5, 545--552 (1998; Zbl 0931.20012)] extends that of descent by also allowing \(n\) to be a descent. Namely, the cyclic descent set \(\mathsf{cDes}(\pi)\) is defined by \[ \mathsf{cDes}(\pi) := \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \mathsf{Des}(\pi) \cup \{n\} & \pi(n) > \pi(1),\\ \mathsf{Des}(\pi) & \pi(n) < \pi(1). \end{array} \right. \] There are notions of descent for other combinatorial objects besides permutations. \textit{R. M. Adin} et al. [Int. Math. Res. Not. 2020, No. 24, 10231--10276 (2020; Zbl 1459.05339)] abstracted from this set-up by defining the notion of a cyclic extension, which axiomatises what it means for a notion of cyclic descent to extend the notion of descent. That is, given some combinatorial object with an associated notion of descent, the work of Adin, Reiner, and Roichman [loc. cit.] sets out the properties that should be satisfied when extending this to a notion of cyclic descent. The combinatorial object the paper is concerned with is that of Motzkin paths, which are paths in the plane from \((0, 0)\) to \((n, 0)\) consisting of up steps \((1,1)\), down steps \((1,-1)\), and horizontal steps \((1,0)\), and which never pass below the \(x\)-axis. They thus generalise the more familiar Dyck paths by allowing horizontal steps. There is a notion of descent for Motzkin paths. The main result of the paper is to define a notion of cyclic descent for Motzkin paths and to show that it is indeed a cyclic extension in the sense of Adin et al. [loc. cit.]. Following this, the author notes that different notions of descent for Motzkin paths can be obtained from different rankings between the three different types of steps. It is then shown that these different notions of descent also have cyclic extensions. There is also a notion of descent for standard Young tableaux where the descent set is given by those entries \(i \in [n - 1]\) where \(i + 1\) is in a lower row. In the final section, the author shows that Motzkin paths are in bijection with standard Young tableaux of a certain skew shape. It is then shown that this bijection preserves descents, which allows one to construct a cyclic extension for the Young tableaux of the particular skew shape.











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