Combinatorics of lattice paths

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2014.This dissertation consists of ve chapters which deal with lattice paths such as Dyck paths, skew Dyck paths and generalized Motzkin paths. They never go below the horizontal axis. We derive the generating functions to enumerate lattice paths according to di erent parameters. These parameters include strings of length 2, 3, 4 and r for all r 2 f2; 3; 4; g, area and semi-base, area and semi-length, and semi-base and semi-perimeter. The coe cients in the series expansion of these generating functions give us the number of combinatorial objects we are interested to count. In particular 1. Chapter 1 is an introduction, here we derive some tools that we are going to use in the subsequent Chapters. We rst state the Lagrange inversion formula which is a remarkable tool widely use to extract coe cients in generating functions, then we derive some generating functions for Dyck paths, skew Dyck paths and Motzkin paths. 2. In Chapter 2 we use generating functions to count the number of occurrences of strings in a Dyck path. We rst derive generating functions for strings of length 2, 3, 4 and r for all r 2 f2; 3; 4; g, we then extract the coe cients in the generating functions to get the number of occurrences of strings in the Dyck paths of semi-length n. 3. In Chapter 3, Sections 3.1 and 3.2 we derive generating functions for the relationship between strings of lengths 2 and 3 and the relationship between strings of lengths 3 and 4 respectively. In Section 3.3 we derive generating functions for the low occurrences of the strings of lengths 2, 3 and 4 and lastly Section 3.4 deals with derivations of generating functions for the high occurrences of some strings . 4. Chapter 4, Subsection 4.1.1 deals with the derivation of the generating functions for skew paths according to semi-base and area, we then derive the generating functions according to area. In Subsection 4.1.2, we consider the same as in Section 4.1.1, but here instead of semi-base we use semi-length. The last section 4.2, we use skew paths to enumerate the number of super-diagonal bar graphs according to perimeter. 5. Chapter 5 deals with the derivation of recurrences for the moments of generalized Motzkin paths, in particular we consider those Motzkin paths that never touch the x-axis except at (0,0) and at the end of the path

Criticality without frustration for quantum spin-1 chains

Frustration-free (FF) spin chains have a property that their ground state minimizes all individual terms in the chain Hamiltonian. We ask how entangled the ground state of a FF quantum spin-s chain with nearest-neighbor interactions can be for small values of s. While FF spin-1/2 chains are known to have unentangled ground states, the case s=1 remains less explored. We propose the first example of a FF translation-invariant spin-1 chain that has a unique highly entangled ground state and exhibits some signatures of a critical behavior. The ground state can be viewed as the uniform superposition of balanced strings of left and right parentheses separated by empty spaces. Entanglement entropy of one half of the chain scales as log(n)/2 + O(1), where n is the number of spins. We prove that the energy gap above the ground state is polynomial in 1/n. The proof relies on a new result concerning statistics of Dyck paths which might be of independent interest.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Version 2: minor changes in the proof of Lemma

Power law violation of the area law in quantum spin chains

The sub-volume scaling of the entanglement entropy with the system's size, $n$, has been a subject of vigorous study in the last decade [1]. The area law provably holds for gapped one dimensional systems [2] and it was believed to be violated by at most a factor of $\log\left(n\right)$ in physically reasonable models such as critical systems. In this paper, we generalize the spin$-1$ model of Bravyi et al [3] to all integer spin-$s$ chains, whereby we introduce a class of exactly solvable models that are physical and exhibit signatures of criticality, yet violate the area law by a power law. The proposed Hamiltonian is local and translationally invariant in the bulk. We prove that it is frustration free and has a unique ground state. Moreover, we prove that the energy gap scales as $n^{-c}$, where using the theory of Brownian excursions, we prove $c\ge2$. This rules out the possibility of these models being described by a conformal field theory. We analytically show that the Schmidt rank grows exponentially with $n$ and that the half-chain entanglement entropy to the leading order scales as $\sqrt{n}$ (Eq. 16). Geometrically, the ground state is seen as a uniform superposition of all $s-$colored Motzkin walks. Lastly, we introduce an external field which allows us to remove the boundary terms yet retain the desired properties of the model. Our techniques for obtaining the asymptotic form of the entanglement entropy, the gap upper bound and the self-contained expositions of the combinatorial techniques, more akin to lattice paths, may be of independent interest.Comment: v3: 10+33 pages. In the PNAS publication, the abstract was rewritten and title changed to "Supercritical entanglement in local systems: Counterexample to the area law for quantum matter". The content is same otherwise. v2: a section was added with an external field to include a model with no boundary terms (open and closed chain). Asymptotic technique is improved. v1:37 pages, 10 figures. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, (Nov. 2016

Path representation of maximal parabolic Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials

We provide simple rules for the computation of Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials in the maximal parabolic case. They are obtained by filling regions delimited by paths with "Dyck strips" obeying certain rules. We compare our results with those of Lascoux and Sch\"utzenberger.Comment: v3: fixed proof of lemma