Orbit lengths for promotion on 2-row and near-hook tableaux

Abstract

Promotion has been well-studied for rectangular standard Young tableaux, in which case the orbit lengths divide the total number of boxes and are described by a cyclic sieving phenomenon (CSP), but little is known about the orbit lengths for tableaux of general shape. We approach this problem by building a stable sequence of tableaux where we fix the bottom portion and add extra boxes to the first row to get $n$ total boxes, with $n$ varying. We show that for 2-row tableaux with a fixed bottom row, the orbit lengths are divisors of certain monic polynomials in $n$, with degree generally equal to the number of distinct lengths of runs of consecutive numbers in the bottom row. For the subsets of 2-row tableaux where all runs have the same length, we show that the orbit lengths are characterized by a CSP polynomial that is a slightly modified version of the major index generating function, like in the rectangle case. We also show that for any stable sequence of tableaux, the orbit lengths are linear in $n$ as long as all non-first-row entries differ from each other by at least 2, which asymptotically happens for almost all tableaux in the limit as $n\to\infty.$ We also calculate the orbit lengths for near-hook tableaux, which are divisors of certain linear or quadratic polynomials in $n$.