Monotone triangles and 312 Pattern Avoidance

Abstract

We demonstrate a natural bijection between a subclass of alternating sign matrices (ASMs) defined by a condition on the corresponding monotone triangle which we call the gapless condition and a subclass of totally symmetric self-complementary plane partitions defined by a similar condition on the corresponding fundamental domains or Magog triangles. We prove that, when restricted to permutations, this class of ASMs reduces to 312-avoiding permutations. This leads us to generalize pattern avoidance on permutations to a family of words associated to ASMs, which we call Gog words. We translate the gapless condition on monotone trangles into a pattern avoidance-like condition on Gog words associated. We estimate the number of gapless monotone triangles using a bijection with p-branchings.