A new operation on partially ordered sets

Recently it has been shown that all non-trivial closed permutation groups containing the automorphism group of the random poset are generated by two types of permutations: the first type are permutations turning the order upside down, and the second type are permutations induced by so-called rotations. In this paper we introduce rotations for finite posets, which can be seen as the poset counterpart of Seidel-switch for finite graphs. We analyze some of their combinatorial properties, and investigate in particular the question of when two finite posets are rotation-equivalent. We moreover give an explicit combinatorial construction of a rotation of the random poset whose image is again isomorphic to the random poset. As a corollary of our results on rotations of finite posets, we obtain that the group of rotating permutations of the random poset is the automorphism group of a homogeneous structure in a finite language.