A birational lifting of the Stanley-Thomas word on products of two chains

Abstract: The dynamics of certain combinatorial actions and their liftings to actions at the piecewise-linear and birational level have been studied lately with an eye towards questions of periodicity, orbit structure, and invariants. One key property enjoyed by the rowmotion operator on certain finite partially-ordered sets is homomesy, where the average value of a statistic is the same for all orbits. To prove refined versions of homomesy in the product of two chain posets, J. Propp and the second author used an equivariant bijection discovered (less formally) by R. Stanley and H. Thomas. We explore the lifting of this "Stanley--Thomas word" to the piecewise-linear, birational, and noncommutative realms. Although the map is no longer a bijection, so cannot be used to prove periodicity directly, it still gives enough information to prove the homomesy at the piecewise-linear and birational levels (a result previously shown by D. Grinberg, S. Hopkins, and S. Okada). Even at the noncommutative level, the Stanley--Thomas word of a poset labeling rotates cyclically with the lifting of antichain rowmotion. Along the way we give some formulas for noncommutative antichain rowmotion that we hope will be first steps towards proving the conjectured periodicity at this level.