Promotion, Tangled Labelings, and Sorting Generating Functions

TL;DR

This paper explores promotion operators on labelings of finite posets, proving conjectures for specific poset classes and introducing generating functions to analyze labeling transformations.

Contribution

It strengthens existing conjectures for certain poset classes and introduces new generating functions to study promotion dynamics.

Findings

Proved the stronger tangled labeling conjecture for inflated rooted forest and shoelace posets.

Established log-concavity of coefficients in the cumulative generating function for ordinal sums of antichains.

Refined the weak order on the symmetric group through new generating function analysis.

Abstract

We study Defant and Kravitz's generalization of Sch\"utzenberger's promotion operator to arbitrary labelings of finite posets in two directions. Defant and Kravitz showed that applying the promotion operator $n-1$ times to a labeling of a poset on $n$ elements always gives a natural labeling of the poset and called a labeling tangled if it requires the full $n-1$ promotions to reach a natural labeling. They also conjectured that there are at most $(n-1)!$ tangled labelings for any poset on $n$ elements. In the first direction, we propose a further strengthening of their conjecture by partitioning tangled labelings according to the element labeled $n-1$ and prove that this stronger conjecture holds for inflated rooted forest posets and a new class of posets called shoelace posets. In the second direction, we introduce sorting generating functions and cumulative generating functions for the number of labelings that require $k$ applications of the promotion operator to give a natural labeling. We prove that the coefficients of the cumulative generating function of the ordinal sum of antichains are log-concave and obtain a refinement of the weak order on the symmetric group.