Multidimensional Toggle Dynamics

J. Propp and T. Roby isolated a phenomenon in which a statistic on a set has the same average value over any orbit as its global average, naming it homomesy. One set they investigated was order ideals of partially ordered sets (posets). They proved that the cardinality statistic on order ideals of the product of two chains poset under rowmotion or promotion exhibits homomesy. We prove an analogous result in the case of the product of three chains where one chain has two elements. In order to prove this result, we generalize from two to n dimensions the recombination technique that D. Einstein and Propp developed to study homomesy. We see that our main homomesy result does not fully generalize to an arbitrary product of three chains, nor to larger products of chains; however, we have a partial generalization to an arbitrary product of three chains. Additional corollaries include refined homomesy results in the product of three chains and a new result on increasing tableaux. We also generalize recombination to any ranked poset and from this, obtain a homomesy result for a type B minuscule poset cross a two-element chain. We conclude by extending the definition of promotion to infinite posets, exploring homomesy, recombination, and a connection to monomial ideals

Combinatorial, piecewise-linear, and birational homomesy for products of two chains

This article illustrates the dynamical concept of $homomesy$ in three kinds of dynamical systems -- combinatorial, piecewise-linear, and birational -- and shows the relationship between these three settings. In particular, we show how the rowmotion and promotion operations of Striker and Williams can be lifted to (continuous) piecewise-linear operations on the order polytope of Stanley, and then lifted to birational operations on the positive orthant in $\mathbb{R}^{|P|}$ and indeed to a dense subset of $\mathbb{C}^{|P|}$. When the poset $P$ is a product of a chain of length $a$ and a chain of length $b$, these lifted operations have order $a+b$, and exhibit the homomesy phenomenon: the time-averages of various quantities are the same in all orbits. One important tool is a concrete realization of the conjugacy between rowmotion and promotion found by Striker and Williams; this $recombination$ $map$ allows us to use homomesy for promotion to deduce homomesy for rowmotion. NOTE: An earlier draft showed that Stanley's transfer map between the order polytope and the chain polytope arises as the tropicalization of an analogous map in the bilinear realm; in 2020 we removed this material for the sake of brevity, especially after Joseph and Roby generalized our proof to the noncommutative realm (see arXiv:1909.09658v3). Readers who nonetheless wish to see our proof can find the September 2018 draft of this preprint through the arXiv

Paths to Understanding Birational Rowmotion on Products of Two Chains

Birational rowmotion is an action on the space of assignments of rational functions to the elements of a finite partially-ordered set (poset). It is lifted from the well-studied rowmotion map on order ideals (equivariantly on antichains) of a poset $P$, which when iterated on special posets, has unexpectedly nice properties in terms of periodicity, cyclic sieving, and homomesy (statistics whose averages over each orbit are constant) [AST11, BW74, CF95, Pan09, PR13, RuSh12,RuWa15+,SW12, ThWi17, Yil17. In this context, rowmotion appears to be related to Auslander-Reiten translation on certain quivers, and birational rowmotion to $Y$-systems of type $A_m \times A_n$ described in Zamolodchikov periodicity. We give a formula in terms of families of non-intersecting lattice paths for iterated actions of the birational rowmotion map on a product of two chains. This allows us to give a much simpler direct proof of the key fact that the period of this map on a product of chains of lengths $r$ and $s$ is $r+s+2$ (first proved by D.~Grinberg and the second author), as well as the first proof of the birational analogue of homomesy along files for such posets.Comment: 31 pages, to appear in Algebraic Combinatoric

A note on statistical averages for oscillating tableaux

We define a statistic called the weight of oscillating tableaux. Oscillating tableaux, a generalization of standard Young tableaux, are certain walks in Young's lattice of partitions. The weight of an oscillating tableau is the sum of the sizes of all the partitions that it visits. We show that the average weight of all oscillating tableaux of shape lambda and length 2n plus the size of lambda has a surprisingly simple formula: it is a quadratic polynomial in the size of lambda and n. Our proof via the theory of differential posets is largely computational. We suggest how the homomesy paradigm of Propp and Roby may lead to a more conceptual proof of this result and reveal a hidden symmetry in the set of perfect matchings.Comment: 7 page