Polyominoes with Nearly Convex Columns: an Undirected Model

Column-convex polyominoes were introduced in 1950’s by Temperley, a mathematical physicist working on “lattice gases”. By now, column-convex polyominoes are a popular and well-understood model. There exist several generalizations of column-convex polyominoes. However, the enumeration by area has been done for only one of the said generalizations, namely for multi-directed animals. In this paper, we introduce a new sequence of supersets of column-convex polyominoes. Our model (we call it level m column-subconvex polyominoes) is defined in a simple way: every column has at most two connected components and, if there are two connected components, the gap between them consists of at most m cells. We focus on the case when cells are hexagons and we compute the area generating functions for the levels one and two. Both of those generating functions are q-series, whereas the area generating function of column-convex polyominoes is a rational function. The growth constants of level one and level two column-subconvex polyominoes are 4.319139 and 4.509480, respectively. For comparison, the growth constants of column-convex polyominoes, multi-directed animals and all polyominoes are 3.863131, 4.587894 and 5.183148, respectively.