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Main Authors: Kálmán, Tamás, Lee, Seunghun, Tóthmérész, Lilla
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01689
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author Kálmán, Tamás
Lee, Seunghun
Tóthmérész, Lilla
author_facet Kálmán, Tamás
Lee, Seunghun
Tóthmérész, Lilla
contents Baker and Wang define the so-called Bernardi action of the sandpile group of a ribbon graph on the set of its spanning trees. This potentially depends on a fixed vertex of the graph but it is independent of the base vertex if and only if the ribbon structure is planar, moreover, in this case the Bernardi action is compatible with planar duality. Earlier, Chan, Church and Grochow and Chan, Glass, Macauley, Perkinson, Werner and Yang proved analogous results about the rotor-routing action. Baker and Wang moreover showed that the Bernardi and rotor-routing actions coincide for plane graphs. We clarify this still confounding picture by giving a canonical definition for the planar Bernardi/rotor-routing action, and also a canonical isomorphism between sandpile groups of planar dual graphs. Our canonical definition implies the compatibility with planar duality via an extremely short argument. We also show hidden symmetries of the problem by proving our results in the slightly more general setting of balanced plane digraphs. Any balanced plane digraph gives rise to a trinity, i.e., a triangulation of the sphere with a three-coloring of the $0$-simplices. Our most important tool is a group associated to trinities, introduced by Cavenagh and Wanless, and a result of a subset of the authors characterizing the Bernardi bijection in terms of a dissection of a root polytope.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1905_01689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The sandpile group of a trinity and a canonical definition for the planar Bernardi action
Kálmán, Tamás
Lee, Seunghun
Tóthmérész, Lilla
Combinatorics
05C10, 05C25
Baker and Wang define the so-called Bernardi action of the sandpile group of a ribbon graph on the set of its spanning trees. This potentially depends on a fixed vertex of the graph but it is independent of the base vertex if and only if the ribbon structure is planar, moreover, in this case the Bernardi action is compatible with planar duality. Earlier, Chan, Church and Grochow and Chan, Glass, Macauley, Perkinson, Werner and Yang proved analogous results about the rotor-routing action. Baker and Wang moreover showed that the Bernardi and rotor-routing actions coincide for plane graphs. We clarify this still confounding picture by giving a canonical definition for the planar Bernardi/rotor-routing action, and also a canonical isomorphism between sandpile groups of planar dual graphs. Our canonical definition implies the compatibility with planar duality via an extremely short argument. We also show hidden symmetries of the problem by proving our results in the slightly more general setting of balanced plane digraphs. Any balanced plane digraph gives rise to a trinity, i.e., a triangulation of the sphere with a three-coloring of the $0$-simplices. Our most important tool is a group associated to trinities, introduced by Cavenagh and Wanless, and a result of a subset of the authors characterizing the Bernardi bijection in terms of a dissection of a root polytope.
title The sandpile group of a trinity and a canonical definition for the planar Bernardi action
topic Combinatorics
05C10, 05C25
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01689