Enumeration of Corner Polyhedra and 3-Connected Schnyder Labelings

We show that corner polyhedra and 3-connected Schnyder labelings join the growing list of planar structures that can be set in exact correspondence with (weighted) models of quadrant walks via a bijection due to Kenyon, Miller, Sheffield and Wilson. Our approach leads to a first polynomial time algorithm to count these struc-tures, and to the determination of their exact asymptotic growth constants: the number p_n of corner polyhedra and s_n of 3-connected Schnyder labelings of size n respectively satisfy (p_n)^1/n → 9/2 and (s_n)^1/n → 16/3 as n goes to infinity. While the growth rates are rational, like in the case of previously known instances of such correspondences, the exponent of the asymptotic polynomial correction to the exponential growth does not appear to follow from the now standard Denisov-Wachtel approach, due to a bimodal behavior of the step set of the underlying tandem walk. However a heuristic argument suggests that these exponents are −1 − π/ arccos(9/16) ≈ −4.23 for p_n and −1 − π/ arccos(22/27) ≈ −6.08 for s_n, which would imply that the associated series are not D-finite.