Toric Promotion with Reflections and Refractions

Abstract

Inspired by recent work on refraction billiards in dynamics, we introduce a notion of refraction for combinatorial billiards. This allows us to define a generalization of toric promotion that we call toric promotion with reflections and refractions, which is a dynamical system defined via a graph $G$ whose edges are partitioned into a set of reflection edges and a set of refraction edges. This system is a discretization of a billiards system in which a beam of light can pass through, reflect off of, or refract through each toric hyperplane in a toric arrangement. Generalizing the main theorem known about toric promotion, we give a simple formula for the orbit structure of toric promotion with reflections and refractions when $G$ is a forest. We also completely describe the orbit sizes when $G$ is a cycle with an even number of refraction edges; this result is new even for ordinary toric promotion (i.e., when there are no refraction edges). When $G$ is a cycle of even size with no reflection edges, we obtain an interesting instance of the cyclic sieving phenomenon.