Let a cyclic group of group order
act on a finite set
, and let
be a generating polynomial
for a statistic on
. The triple
exhibits the cyclic sieving phenomenon if, for every
divisor
of
and every primitive
th root of unity
,
Thus evaluations of at roots of unity count
the fixed points of corresponding elements of the
group action (Reiner et al. 2004).
Armstrong (2026) studied multisets of fixed cardinality whose elements have multiplicity less than a bound
.
When a cyclic group acts by rotating the underlying
labels, the associated bounded q-binomial
coefficient gives cyclic sieving whenever the relevant rotation order is relatively
prime to
.
This simultaneously generalizes the cases of subsets and
unrestricted multisets. Specializing at certain roots
of unity also connects these polynomials with
the two-denomination coin problem.