Noncrossing Arc Diagrams, Tamari Lattices, and Parabolic Quotients of the Symmetric Group

Ordering permutations by containment of inversion sets yields a fascinating partial order on the symmetric group: the weak order. This partial order is, among other things, a semidistributive lattice. As a consequence, every permutation has a canonical representation as a join of other permutations. Combinatorially, these canonical join representations can be modeled in terms of arc diagrams. Moreover, these arc diagrams also serve as a model to understand quotient lattices of the weak order. A particularly well-behaved quotient lattice of the weak order is the well-known Tamari lattice, which appears in many seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics. The arc diagrams representing the members of the Tamari lattices are better known as noncrossing partitions. Recently, the Tamari lattices were generalized to parabolic quotients of the symmetric group. In this article, we undertake a structural investigation of these parabolic Tamari lattices, and explain how modified arc diagrams aid the understanding of these lattices.

Minimal factorizations of a cycle: a multivariate generating function

International audience It is known that the number of minimal factorizations of the long cycle in the symmetric group into a product of k cycles of given lengths has a very simple formula: it is nk−1 where n is the rank of the underlying symmetric group and k is the number of factors. In particular, this is nn−2 for transposition factorizations. The goal of this work is to prove a multivariate generalization of this result. As a byproduct, we get a multivariate analog of Postnikov's hook length formula for trees, and a refined enumeration of final chains of noncrossing partitions.

Noncrossing partitions, toggles, and homomesy

International audience We introduce n(n − 1)/2 natural involutions (“toggles”) on the set S of noncrossing partitions π of size n, along with certain composite operations obtained by composing these involutions. We show that for many operations T of this kind, a surprisingly large family of functions f on S (including the function that sends π to the number of blocks of π) exhibits the homomesy phenomenon: the average of f over the elements of a T -orbit is the same for all T -orbits. Our methods apply more broadly to toggle operations on independent sets of certain graphs.

DEGREE OF THE -OPERATOR AND NONCROSSING PARTITIONS

The $W$-operator, $W([n])$, generalises the cut-and-join operator. We prove that $W([n])$ can be written as the sum of $n!$ terms, each term corresponding uniquely to a permutation in $S_{\!n}$. We also prove that there is a correspondence between the terms of $W([n])$ with maximal degree and noncrossing partitions.

The Canonical Join Complex

A canonical join representation is a certain minimal "factorization" of an element in a finite lattice $L$ analogous to the prime factorization of an integer from number theory. The expression $\bigvee A =w$ is the canonical join representation of $w$ if $A$ is the unique lowest subset of $L$ satisfying $\bigvee A=w$ (where "lowest" is made precise by comparing order ideals under containment). Canonical join representations appear in many familiar guises, with connections to comparability graphs and noncrossing partitions. When each element in $L$ has a canonical join representation, we define the canonical join complex to be the abstract simplicial complex of subsets $A$ such that $\bigvee A$ is a canonical join representation. We characterize the class of finite lattices whose canonical join complex is flag, and show how the canonical join complex is related to the topology of $L$.

Combinatorics of Exceptional Sequences in Type A

Exceptional sequences are certain sequences of quiver representations. We introduce a class of objects called strand diagrams and use these to classify exceptional sequences of representations of a quiver whose underlying graph is a type $\mathbb{A}_n$ Dynkin diagram. We also use variations of these objects to classify $c$-matrices of such quivers, to interpret exceptional sequences as linear extensions of explicitly constructed posets, and to give a simple bijection between exceptional sequences and certain saturated chains in the lattice of noncrossing partitions.