Chip-Firing and Rotor-Routing on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and on Trees

Landau, Itamar ; Levine, Lionel ; Peres, Yuval

Discrete mathematics & theoretical computer science, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AJ, 20th Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2008), DMTCS Proceedings vol. AJ, 20th Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2008) (2008).

Résumé

The sandpile group of a graph $G$ is an abelian group whose order is the number of spanning trees of $G$. We find the decomposition of the sandpile group into cyclic subgroups when $G$ is a regular tree with the leaves are collapsed to a single vertex. This result can be used to understand the behavior of the rotor-router model, a deterministic analogue of random walk studied first by physicists and more recently rediscovered by combinatorialists. Several years ago, Jim Propp simulated a simple process called rotor-router aggregation and found that it produces a near perfect disk in the integer lattice $\mathbb{Z}^2$. We prove that this shape is close to circular, although it remains a challenge to explain the near perfect circularity produced by simulations. In the regular tree, we use the sandpile group to prove that rotor-router aggregation started from an acyclic initial condition yields a perfect ball.

Détail

DOI : 10.46298/dmtcs.3618