English

Refinements of the braid arrangement and two parameter Fuss-Catalan numbers

Combinatorics 2023-09-12 v1

Abstract

A hyperplane arrangement in Rn\mathbb{R}^n is a finite collection of affine hyperplanes. Counting regions of hyperplane arrangements is an active research direction in enumerative combinatorics. In this paper, we consider the arrangement An(m)\mathcal{A}_n^{(m)} in Rn\mathbb{R}^n given by {xi=0i[n]}{xi=akxjk[m,m],1i<jn}\{x_i=0 \mid i \in [n]\} \cup \{x_i=a^kx_j \mid k \in [-m,m], 1\leq i<j \leq n\} for some fixed a>1a>1. It turns out that this family of arrangements is closely related to the well-studied extended Catalan arrangement of type AA. We prove that the number of regions of An(m)\mathcal{A}_n^{(m)} is a certain generalization of Catalan numbers called two parameter Fuss-Catalan numbers. We then exhibit a bijection between these regions and certain decorated Dyck paths. We also compute the characteristic polynomial and give a combinatorial interpretation for its coefficients. Most of our results also generalize to sub-arrangements of An(m)\mathcal{A}_n^{(m)} by relating them to deformations of the braid arrangement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.12231,
  title  = {Refinements of the braid arrangement and two parameter Fuss-Catalan numbers},
  author = {Priyavrat Deshpande and Krishna Menon and Writika Sarkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.12231},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

18 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Comments welcome