Enriched Cycle Structures and Roots of Permutations

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality between r-regular and r-cycle permutations, introduces r-enriched permutations, and provides a combinatorial proof of monotonicity for the probability of permutations having an r-th root, especially for prime powers.

Contribution

It introduces r-enriched permutations and establishes a bijection with r-regular permutations, offering a combinatorial proof of monotonicity for the probability of having an r-th root.

Findings

Established a bijection between r-regular and enriched r-cycle permutations.

Proved monotonicity of the probability p_r(n) for prime power r.

Provided a combinatorial understanding of the monotone property for permutation roots.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a duality between $r$-regular permutations and $r$-cycle permutations, and a monotone property due to B\'ona-McLennan-White on the probability $p_r(n)$ for a random permutation of $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ to have an $r$-th root, where $r$ is a prime. For $r=2$, the duality relates permutations with odd cycles to permutations with even cycles. To handle the general case where $r\geq 2$, we define an $r$-enriched permutation as a permutation with $r$-singular cycles colored by one of the colors $1, 2, \ldots, r-1$. In this setup, we discover a bijection between $r$-regular permutations and enriched $r$-cycle permutations, which in turn yields a stronger version of an inequality of B\'ona-McLennan-White. This leads to a fully combinatorial understanding of the monotone property, thereby answering their question. When $r$ is a prime power $q^l$, we further show that $p_r(n)$ is monotone. In the case that $n+1 \not\equiv 0 \pmod q$, the equality $p_r(n)=p_r(n+1)$ has been established by Chernoff.