Brick Wall Excursions: Combinatorial Interpretation of Random Flight Moments

Abstract

We study the expected distance of short uniform random walks in arbitrary dimensions with unit steps in random directions. It is known that for dimensions $d=2$ and $d=4$, all the moments of an $m$-step walk are integer. While for $d=2$, the $n$th moment can be interpreted as the number of abelian squares of length $2n$ over an alphabet with $m$ letters, for $d=4$ no interpretation was known. The goal of this paper is to provide such an interpretation, both for $d=2$ and $d=4$, in terms of $2n$-step lattice paths in dimension $m-1$. Our construction relies on a bijection between Dyck paths with a prescribed number of peaks and words of a certain type. In addition, this bijection allows us to derive closed formulas for the number of lattice paths provided with certain statistics.