Representation stability and configurations of disks in a strip

Representation stability, formalized in 2012 by Church, Ellenberg, and Farb, is a property exhibited by the homology of the configuration space of points in the plane: even as the number of points goes to infinity, the jth homology is generated by cycles in which at most 2j of the points move. What about the configuration space of disks of width 1 in an infinite strip of width w? This disks in a strip space behaves more like the no-k-equal configuration space of the line, where k-1 but not k points may be collocated; we show that the homology of this no-k-equal space exhibits generalized representation stability as defined by Sam–Snowden and Ramos. The method is to compute homology combinatorially using discrete Morse theory. Unlike other examples of homology with generalized representation stability, here the asymptotic behavior depends on the degree of homology.