Tile-Transitive Tilings of the Euclidean and Hyperbolic Planes by Ribbons

Abstract

We present a method to enumerate tile-transitive crystallographic tilings of the Euclidean and hyperbolic planes by unbounded ribbon tiles up to equivariant equivalence. The hyperbolic case is relevant to self-assembly of branched polymers. This is achieved by combining and extending known methods for enumerating crystallographic disk-like tilings. We obtain a natural way of describing all possible stabiliser subgroups of tile-transitive tilings using a topological viewpoint of the tile edges as a graph embedded in an orbifold, and a group theoretical one derived from the structure of fundamental domains for discrete groups of planar isometries.