The two-sided peak polynomial

Abstract

We derive a generating function identity for the joint distribution of the numbers of peaks of a permutation and its inverse, via enriched $P$-partitions. The coefficients of the corresponding peak polynomial $W_n(s,t)$ satisfy a second-order recurrence. A martingale formulation of this recurrence yields a bivariate central limit theorem, showing that the two statistics are asymptotically independent. We also give an exact closed form for their covariance, which is of order $n^{-1}$.