Rational Noncrossing Partitions for all Coprime Pairs

Abstract

For coprime positive integers $a<b$, Armstrong, Rhoades, and Williams (2013) defined a set $NC(a,b)$ of rational noncrossing partitions, a subset of the ordinary noncrossing partitions of $\{1, \ldots, b-1\}$. Bodnar and Rhoades (2015) confirmed their conjecture that $NC(a,b)$ is closed under rotation and proved an instance of the cyclic sieving phenomenon for this rotation action. We give a definition of $NC(a,b)$ which works for all coprime $a$ and $b$ and prove closure under rotation and cyclic sieving in this more general setting. We also generalize noncrossing parking functions to all coprime $a$ and $b$, and provide a character formula for the action of $\mathfrak{S}_a \times \mathbb{Z}_{b-1}$ on $\mathsf{Park}^{NC}(a,b)$.