Further Bijections to Pattern-Avoiding Valid Hook Configurations

Abstract: Valid hook configurations are combinatorial objects used to understand West's stack-sorting map. We extend existing bijections corresponding valid hook configurations to intervals in partial orders on Motzkin paths. To enumerate valid hook configurations on $312$-avoiding permutations, we build off of an existing bijection into a Motzkin poset and construct a bijection to certain well-studied closed lattice walks in the first quadrant. We use existing results about these lattice paths to show that valid hook configurations on $312$-avoiding permutations are not counted by a $D$-finite generating function, resolving a question of Defant's, and additionally to compute asymptotics for the number of such configurations. We also extend a bijection of Defant's to a correspondence between valid hook configurations on $132$-avoiding permutations and intervals in the Motzkin-Tamari posets, providing a more elegant proof of Defant's enumeration thereof. To investigate this bijection, we present a number of lemmas about valid hook configurations that are generally applicable and further study the bijections of Defant's.