Enumeration of non-crossing partitions according to subwords with repeated letters

Abstract

An avoidance pattern where the letters within an occurrence of which are required to be adjacent is referred to as a subword. In this paper, we enumerate members of the set NC_n of non-crossing partitions of length n according to the number of occurrences of several infinite families of subword patterns each containing repeated letters. As a consequence of our results, we obtain explicit generating function formulas counting the members of NC_n for n >= 0 according to all subword patterns of length three containing a repeated letter. Further, simple expressions are deduced for the total number of occurrences over all members of NC_n for the various families of patterns. Finally, combinatorial proofs can be given explaining three infinite families of subword equivalences over NC_n, which generalize the following equivalences: 211 = 221, 1211 = 1121 and 112 = 122.