Greek letters in random staircase tableaux

Abstract

In this paper we study a relatively new combinatorial object called staircase tableaux. Staircase tableaux were introduced by Corteel and Williams in the connection with Asymmetric Exclusion Process and has since found interesting connections with Askey - Wilson polynomials. We develop a probabilistic approach that allows us to analyze several parameters of a randomly chosen staircase tableaux of a given size. In particular, we obtain limiting distributions for statistics associated with appearances of Greek letters in staircase. tableaux.