A birational lifting of the Stanley-Thomas word on products of two chains

The dynamics of certain combinatorial actions and their liftings to actions at the piecewise-linear and birational level have been studied lately with an eye towards questions of periodicity, orbit structure, and invariants. One key property enjoyed by the rowmotion operator on certain finite partially-ordered sets is homomesy, where the average value of a statistic is the same for all orbits. To prove refined versions of homomesy in the product of two chain posets, J. Propp and the second author used an equivariant bijection discovered (less formally) by R. Stanley and H. Thomas. We explore the lifting of this "Stanley--Thomas word" to the piecewise-linear, birational, and noncommutative realms. Although the map is no longer a bijection, so cannot be used to prove periodicity directly, it still gives enough information to prove the homomesy at the piecewise-linear and birational levels (a result previously shown by D. Grinberg, S. Hopkins, and S. Okada). Even at the noncommutative level, the Stanley--Thomas word of a poset labeling rotates cyclically with the lifting of antichain rowmotion. Along the way we give some formulas for noncommutative antichain rowmotion that we hope will be first steps towards proving the conjectured periodicity at this level. Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures

A Note on Graphs with Prescribed Orbit Structure

This paper presents a proof of the existence of connected, undirected graphs with prescribed orbit structure, giving an explicit construction procedure for these graphs. Trees with prescribed orbit structure are also investigated.

About the Orbit Structure of Sequences of Maps of Integers

Motivated by connections to the study of sequences of integers, we study, from a dynamical systems point of view, the orbit structure for certain sequences of maps of integers. We find sequences of maps for which all individual orbits are bounded and periodic and for which the number of periodic orbits of fixed period is finite. This allows the introduction of a formal ζ -function for the maps in these sequences, which are actually polynomials. We also find sequences of maps for which the orbit structure is more complicated, as they have both bounded and unbounded orbits, both individual and global. Most of our results are valid in a general numeration base.

Toggling Independent Sets of a Path Graph

This paper explores the orbit structure and homomesy (constant averages over orbits) properties of certain actions of toggle groups on the collection of independent sets of a path graph. In particular we prove a generalization of a homomesy conjecture of Propp that for the action of a "Coxeter element" of vertex toggles, the difference of indicator functions of symmetrically-located vertices is 0-mesic. Then we use our analysis to show facts about orbit sizes that are easy to conjecture but nontrivial to prove. Besides its intrinsic interest, this particular combinatorial dynamical system is valuable in providing an interesting example of (a) homomesy in a context where large orbit sizes make a cyclic sieving phenomenon unlikely to exist, (b) the use of Coxeter theory to greatly generalize the set of actions for which results hold, and (c) the usefulness of Striker's notion of generalized toggle groups.