Distributive Lattices, Polyhedra, and Generalized Flow

A D-polyhedron is a polyhedron $P$ such that if $x,y$ are in $P$ then so are their componentwise max and min. In other words, the point set of a D-polyhedron forms a distributive lattice with the dominance order. We provide a full characterization of the bounding hyperplanes of D-polyhedra. Aside from being a nice combination of geometric and order theoretic concepts, D-polyhedra are a unifying generalization of several distributive lattices which arise from graphs. In fact every D-polyhedron corresponds to a directed graph with arc-parameters, such that every point in the polyhedron corresponds to a vertex potential on the graph. Alternatively, an edge-based description of the point set can be given. The objects in this model are dual to generalized flows, i.e., dual to flows with gains and losses. These models can be specialized to yield some cases of distributive lattices that have been studied previously. Particular specializations are: lattices of flows of planar digraphs (Khuller, Naor and Klein), of $\alpha$-orientations of planar graphs (Felsner), of c-orientations (Propp) and of $\Delta$-bonds of digraphs (Felsner and Knauer). As an additional application we exhibit a distributive lattice structure on generalized flow of breakeven planar digraphs.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure

Digraphs and cycle polynomials for free-by-cyclic groups

Let \phi \in \mbox{Out}(F_n) be a free group outer automorphism that can be represented by an expanding, irreducible train-track map. The automorphism $\phi$ determines a free-by-cyclic group $\Gamma=F_n \rtimes_\phi \mathbb Z,$ and a homomorphism $\alpha \in H^1(\Gamma; \mathbb Z)$. By work of Neumann, Bieri-Neumann-Strebel and Dowdall-Kapovich-Leininger, $\alpha$ has an open cone neighborhood $\mathcal A$ in $H^1(\Gamma;\mathbb R)$ whose integral points correspond to other fibrations of $\Gamma$ whose associated outer automorphisms are themselves representable by expanding irreducible train-track maps. In this paper, we define an analog of McMullen's Teichm\"uller polynomial that computes the dilatations of all outer automorphism in $\mathcal A$.Comment: 41 pages, 20 figure

Primitive digraphs with large exponents and slowly synchronizing automata

We present several infinite series of synchronizing automata for which the minimum length of reset words is close to the square of the number of states. All these automata are tightly related to primitive digraphs with large exponent.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. This is a translation (with a slightly updated bibliography) of the authors' paper published in Russian in: Zapiski Nauchnyh Seminarov POMI [Kombinatorika i Teorija Grafov. IV], Vol. 402, 9-39 (2012), see ftp://ftp.pdmi.ras.ru/pub/publicat/znsl/v402/p009.pdf Version 2: a few typos are correcte