Crossings and Nestings Over Some Motzkin Objects and $q$-Motzkin Numbers

Abstract

We examine the enumeration of certain Motzkin objects according to the numbers of crossings and nestings. With respect to continued fractions, we compute and express the distributions of the statistics of the numbers of crossings and nestings over three sets, namely the set of $4321$-avoiding involutions, the set of $3412$-avoiding involutions, and the set of $(321,3\bar{1}42)$-avoiding permutations. To get our results, we exploit the bijection of Biane restricted to the sets of $4321$- and $3412$-avoiding involutions which was characterized by Barnabei et al. and the bijection between $(321,3\bar{1}42)$-avoiding permutations and Motzkin paths, presented by Chen et al.. Furthermore, we manipulate the obtained continued fractions to get the recursion formulas for the polynomial distributions of crossings and nestings, and it follows that the results involve two new $q$-Motzkin numbers.