Generalizations of an Expansion Formula for Top to Random Shuffles

In the top to random shuffle, the first \({a}\) cards are removed from a deck of \({n}\) cards \({12 \cdots n}\) and then inserted back into the deck. This action can be studied by treating the top to random shuffle as an element \({B_a}\), which we define formally in Section 2, of the algebra \({{\mathbb{Q}S_n]}}\). For \({a = 1}\), Garsia in “On the powers of top to random shuffling” (2002) derived an expansion formula for \({{B^k_1}}\) for \({{k \leq n}}\), though his proof for the formula was non-bijective. We prove, bijectively, an expansion formula for the arbitrary finite product \({B_{a1} B_{a2} \cdots B_{ak}}\) where \({a_{1}, \cdots , a_{k}}\) are positive integers, from which an improved version of Garsia’s aforementioned formula follows. We show some applications of this formula for \({B_{a1} B_{a2} \cdots B_{ak}}\), which include enumeration and calculating probabilities. Then for an arbitrary group \({G}\) we define the group of \({G}\)-permutations \({{S^G_n} := {G \wr S_n}}\) and further generalize the aforementioned expansion formula to the algebra \({{\mathbb{Q} S^G_n ]}}\) for the case of finite \({G}\), and we show how other similar expansion formulae in \({{\mathbb{Q} S_n]}}\) can be generalized to \({{\mathbb{Q} S^G_n]}}\).