A study on the fixed points of the $\gamma$ function

Abstract

Recently a permutation on Dyck paths, related to the chip firing game, was introduced and studied by Barnabei et al.. It is called $\gamma$-operator, and uses symmetries and reflections to relate Dyck paths having the same length. A relevant research topic concerns the study of the fixed points of $\gamma$ and a characterization of these objects was provided by Barnabei et al, leaving the problem of their enumeration open. In this paper, using tools from combinatorics of words, we determine new combinatorial properties of the fixed points of $\gamma$. Then we present an algorithm, denoted by \textbf{GenGammaPath}($t$), which receives as input an array $t=(t_0, \ldots ,t_{k})$ of positive integers and generates all the elements of $F_{\gamma}$ with degree $k$.