Fully Packed Loop configurations in a triangle (TFPLs) first appeared in the
study of ordinary Fully Packed Loop configurations (FPLs) on the square grid
where they were used to show that the number of FPLs with a given link pattern
that has m nested arches is a polynomial function in m. It soon turned out that
TFPLs possess a number of other nice properties. For instance, they can be seen
as a generalized model of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. We start our
article by introducing oriented versions of TFPLs; their main advantage in
comparison with ordinary TFPLs is that they involve only local constraints.
Three main contributions are provided. Firstly, we show that the number of
ordinary TFPLs can be extracted from a weighted enumeration of oriented TFPLs
and thus it suffices to consider the latter. Secondly, we decompose oriented
TFPLs into two matchings and use a classical bijection to obtain two families
of nonintersecting lattice paths (path tangles). This point of view turns out
to be extremely useful for giving easy proofs of previously known conditions on
the boundary of TFPLs necessary for them to exist. One example is the
inequality d(u)+d(v)<=d(w) where u,v,w are 01-words that encode the boundary
conditions of ordinary TFPLs and d(u) is the number of cells in the Ferrers
diagram associated with u. In the third part we consider TFPLs with d(w)-
d(u)-d(v)=0,1; in the first case their numbers are given by
Littlewood-Richardson coefficients, but also in the second case we provide
formulas that are in terms of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. The proofs of
these formulas are of a purely combinatorial nature.Comment: 40 pages, 31 figure