Forbidden ordinal patterns are ordinal patterns (or `rank blocks') that cannot appear in the orbits generated by a map taking values on a linearly ordered space, in which case we say that the map has forbidden patterns. Once a map has a forbidden pattern of a given length $L_{0}$, it has forbidden patterns of any length $L\ge L_{0}$ and their number grows superexponentially with $L$. Using recent results on topological permutation entropy, we study in this paper the existence and some basic properties of forbidden ordinal patterns for self maps on n-dimensional intervals. Our most applicable conclusion is that expansive interval maps with finite topological entropy have necessarily forbidden patterns, although we conjecture that this is also the case under more general conditions. The theoretical results are nicely illustrated for n=2 both using the naive counting estimator for forbidden patterns and Chao's estimator for the number of classes in a population. The robustness of forbidden ordinal patterns against observational white noise is also illustrated.

19 pages, 6 figures