Mathematics Commons^™

Sandpiles, Spanning Trees, And Plane Duality, Melody Chan, Darren B. Glass, Matthew Macauley, David Perkinson, Caryn Werner, Qiaoyu Yang

Math Faculty Publications

Let G be a connected, loopless multigraph. The sandpile group of G is a finite abelian group associated to G whose order is equal to the number of spanning trees in G. Holroyd et al. used a dynamical process on graphs called rotor-routing to define a simply transitive action of the sandpile group of G on its set of spanning trees. Their definition depends on two pieces of auxiliary data: a choice of a ribbon graph structure on G, and a choice of a root vertex. Chan, Church, and Grochow showed that if G is a planar ribbon graph, it …