Algebraic and combinatorial aspects of sandpile monoids on directed graphs

Abstract

The sandpile group of a graph is a well-studied object that combines ideas from algebraic graph theory, group theory, dynamical systems, and statistical physics. A graph's sandpile group is part of a larger algebraic structure on the graph, known as its sandpile monoid. Most of the work on sandpiles so far has focused on the sandpile group rather than the sandpile monoid of a graph, and has also assumed the underlying graph to be undirected. A notable exception is the recent work of Babai and Toumpakari, which builds up the theory of sandpile monoids on directed graphs from scratch and provides many connections between the combinatorics of a graph and the algebraic aspects of its sandpile monoid. In this paper we primarily consider sandpile monoids on directed graphs, and we extend the existing theory in four main ways. First, we give a combinatorial classification of the maximal subgroups of a sandpile monoid on a directed graph in terms of the sandpile groups of certain easily-identifiable subgraphs. Second, we point out certain sandpile results for undirected graphs that are really results for sandpile monoids on directed graphs that contain exactly two idempotents. Third, we give a new algebraic constraint that sandpile monoids must satisfy and exhibit two infinite families of monoids that cannot be realized as sandpile monoids on any graph. Finally, we give an explicit combinatorial description of the sandpile group identity for every graph in a family of directed graphs which generalizes the family of (undirected) distanceregular graphs. This family includes many other graphs of interest, including iterated wheels, regular trees, and regular tournaments.

Chip firing on Dynkin diagrams and McKay quivers

“…Remark 2.18. There is an extensive theory of critical groups for avalanche-finite matrices C that come from directed graphs (see [11,5,23,32,36]). In it, one starts with a directed graph D on node set {0, 1, 2, .…”

Connections between Abelian sandpile models and the $K$-theory of weighted Leavitt path algebras

“…(See e.g. [6] or [11] for additional information). For k j ∈ N we envision k j grains of sand sitting on each non-sink vertex v j of E. Each vertex v j fires one grain of sand along each edge emitted by v j to its adjacent vertices exactly when the number of grains of sand sitting at v j is equal to or larger than the number of edges emitting from v j .…”

“…The smallest set of configurations of SP(E) which is closed under adding any grains to them (i.e., the recurrent configurations) forms a group, called the sandpile group G(E) associated to E. These algebraic structures constitute one of the main themes of the subject. A more algebraic study of these monoids and their groups is carried out in [6,11]. The books of Klivans [17] and Corry and Perkinson [12] give self-contained treatments of the subject of sandpile models.…”