A Combinatorial Bijection on di-sk Trees

Source abstract

A di-sk tree is a rooted binary tree whose nodes are labeled by $\oplus$ or $\ominus$, and no node has the same label as its right child. The di-sk trees are in natural bijection with separable permutations. We construct a combinatorial bijection on di-sk trees proving the two quintuples $(\mathrm{LMAX},\mathrm{LMIN},\mathrm{DESB},\mathsf{iar},\mathsf{comp})$ and $(\mathrm{LMAX},\mathrm{LMIN},\mathrm{DESB},\mathsf{comp},\mathsf{iar})$ have the same distribution over separable permutations. Here for a permutation $\pi$, $\mathrm{LMAX}(\pi)/\mathrm{LMIN}(\pi)$ is the set of values of the left-to-right maxima/minima of $\pi$ and $\mathrm{DESB}(\pi)$ is the set of descent bottoms of $\pi$, while $\mathsf{comp}(\pi)$ and $\mathsf{iar}(\pi)$ are respectively the number of components of $\pi$ and the length of initial ascending run of $\pi$. Interestingly, our bijection specializes to a bijection on $312$-avoiding permutations, which provides (up to the classical Knuth–Richards bijection) an alternative approach to a result of Rubey (2016) that asserts the two triples $(\mathrm{LMAX},\mathsf{iar},\mathsf{comp})$ and $(\mathrm{LMAX},\mathsf{comp},\mathsf{iar})$ are equidistributed on $321$-avoiding permutations. Rubey's result is a symmetric extension of an equidistribution due to Adin–Bagno–Roichman, which implies the class of $321$-avoiding permutations with a prescribed number of components is Schur positive. Some equidistribution results for various statistics concerning tree traversal are presented in the end.