The number of descents of the invariant in a tensor power of the adjoint representation of the rank two general linear group.
Following Stembridge [1, cor.4.7], the highest weight words indexing the irreducibles in $\mathfrak{gl_n}^{\otimes r}$ are staircase tableaux of length $2r$: sequences $(\gamma^{(0)},\dots,\gamma^{(2r)})$ of vectors in $\mathbb Z^n$ with decreasing entries, such that $\gamma^{(2i+1)}$ is obtained from $\gamma^{(2i)}$ by adding a unit vector and $\gamma^{(2i)}$ is obtained from $\gamma^{(2i-1)}$ by subtracting a unit vector.
For $n=2$, the staircase tableaux whose final element is the zero vector are in natural correspondence with Dyck paths: adding the first or subtracting the second unit vector is translated to an up step, whereas adding the second or subtracting the first unit vector is translated to a down step.
A Dyck path can be transformed into a bicoloured Motzkin path by replacing double up steps (double down, up-down, down-up steps) with up steps (down, coloured level, level steps). Note that the resulting path cannot have coloured level steps at height zero.
In this context, say that a bicoloured Motzkin path has a $\mathfrak{gl}_2$-descent between the following pairs of steps:

• an up step followed by a level step
• an up step followed by a down step, if the final height is not zero
• a coloured level step followed by any non-coloured step.

Then, conjecturally, the quasisymmetric expansion of the Frobenius character of the symmetric group $\mathfrak S_r$ acting on $\mathfrak{gl}_2^{\otimes r}$, is
$$ \sum_M F_{Des(M)}, $$
where the sum is over all length $r$ prefixes of bicoloured Motzkin paths, $Des(M)$ is the set of indices of descents of the path $M$ and $F_D$ is Gessel's fundamental quasisymmetric function.
The statistic recorded here is the number of $\mathfrak{gl}_2$-descents in the bicoloured Motzkin path corresponding to the Dyck path.
Restricting to Motzkin paths without coloured steps one obtains the quasisymmetric expansion for the Frobenius character of $\mathfrak S_r$ acting on $\mathfrak{sl}_2^{\otimes r}$. In this case, the conjecture was shown by Braunsteiner [2].

Return the Dyck path corresponding to the parallelogram polyomino obtained by applying Delest-Viennot's bijection.
Let $D$ be a Dyck path of semilength $n$. The parallelogram polyomino $\gamma(D)$ is defined as follows: let $\tilde D = d_0 d_1 \dots d_{2n+1}$ be the Dyck path obtained by prepending an up step and appending a down step to $D$. Then, the upper path of $\gamma(D)$ corresponds to the sequence of steps of $\tilde D$ with even indices, and the lower path of $\gamma(D)$ corresponds to the sequence of steps of $\tilde D$ with odd indices.
The Delest-Viennot bijection $\beta$ returns the parallelogram polyomino, whose column heights are the heights of the peaks of the Dyck path, and the intersection heights between columns are the heights of the valleys of the Dyck path.
This map returns the Dyck path $(\gamma^{(-1)}\circ\beta)(D)$.

The bounce path determined by an integer composition.

Sends a Dyck path $D$ of length $2n$ to its bounce path.
This path is formed by starting at the endpoint $(n,n)$ of $D$ and travelling west until encountering the first vertical step of $D$, then south until hitting the diagonal, then west again to hit $D$, etc. until the point $(0,0)$ is reached.
This map is the first part of the zeta map Mp00030zeta map.