A simple model of trees for unicellular maps

We consider unicellular maps, or polygon gluings, of fixed genus. A few years ago the first author gave a recursive bijection transforming unicellular maps into trees, explaining the presence of Catalan numbers in counting formulas for these objects. In this paper, we give another bijection that explicitly describes the "recursive part" of the first bijection. As a result we obtain a very simple description of unicellular maps as pairs made by a plane tree and a permutation-like structure. All the previously known formulas follow as an immediate corollary or easy exercise, thus giving a bijective proof for each of them, in a unified way. For some of these formulas, this is the first bijective proof, e.g. the Harer-Zagier recurrence formula, the Lehman-Walsh formula and the Goupil-Schaeffer formula. We also discuss several applications of our construction: we obtain a new proof of an identity related to covered maps due to Bernardi and the first author, and thanks to previous work of the second author, we give a new expression for Stanley character polynomials, which evaluate irreducible characters of the symmetric group. Finally, we show that our techniques apply partially to unicellular 3-constellations and to related objects that we call quasi-constellations.Comment: v5: minor revision after reviewers comments, 33 pages, added a refinement by degree of the Harer-Zagier formula and more details in some proof

Harer-Zagier formula via Fock space

The goal of this note is to provide a very short proof of Harer-Zagier formula for the number of ways of obtaining a genus g Riemann surface by identifying in pairs the sides of a (2d)-gon, using semi-infinite wedge formalism operators.Comment: 5 pages, comments are welcom

Models of discretized moduli spaces, cohomological field theories, and Gaussian means

We prove combinatorially the explicit relation between genus filtrated $s$-loop means of the Gaussian matrix model and terms of the genus expansion of the Kontsevich--Penner matrix model (KPMM). The latter is the generating function for volumes of discretized (open) moduli spaces $M_{g,s}^{\mathrm{disc}}$ given by $N_{g,s}(P_1,\dots,P_s)$ for $(P_1,\dots,P_s)\in{\mathbb Z}_+^s$. This generating function therefore enjoys the topological recursion, and we prove that it is simultaneously the generating function for ancestor invariants of a cohomological field theory thus enjoying the Givental decomposition. We use another Givental-type decomposition obtained for this model by the second authors in 1995 in terms of special times related to the discretisation of moduli spaces thus representing its asymptotic expansion terms (and therefore those of the Gaussian means) as finite sums over graphs weighted by lower-order monomials in times thus giving another proof of (quasi)polynomiality of the discrete volumes. As an application, we find the coefficients in the first subleading order for ${\mathcal M}_{g,1}$ in two ways: using the refined Harer--Zagier recursion and by exploiting the above Givental-type transformation. We put forward the conjecture that the above graph expansions can be used for probing the reduction structure of the Delgne--Mumford compactification $\overline{\mathcal M}_{g,s}$ of moduli spaces of punctured Riemann surfaces.Comment: 36 pages in LaTex, 6 LaTex figure

Simple recurrence formulas to count maps on orientable surfaces

We establish a simple recurrence formula for the number $Q_g^n$ of rooted orientable maps counted by edges and genus. We also give a weighted variant for the generating polynomial $Q_g^n(x)$ where $x$ is a parameter taking the number of faces of the map into account, or equivalently a simple recurrence formula for the refined numbers $M_g^{i,j}$ that count maps by genus, vertices, and faces. These formulas give by far the fastest known way of computing these numbers, or the fixed-genus generating functions, especially for large $g$. In the very particular case of one-face maps, we recover the Harer-Zagier recurrence formula. Our main formula is a consequence of the KP equation for the generating function of bipartite maps, coupled with a Tutte equation, and it was apparently unnoticed before. It is similar in look to the one discovered by Goulden and Jackson for triangulations, and indeed our method to go from the KP equation to the recurrence formula can be seen as a combinatorial simplification of Goulden and Jackson's approach (together with one additional combinatorial trick). All these formulas have a very combinatorial flavour, but finding a bijective interpretation is currently unsolved.Comment: Version 3: We changed the title once again. We also corrected some misprints, gave another equivalent formulation of the main result in terms of vertices and faces (Thm. 5), and added complements on bivariate generating functions. Version 2: We extended the main result to include the ability to track the number of faces. The title of the paper has been changed accordingl

Resolvents and Seiberg-Witten representation for Gaussian beta-ensemble

The exact free energy of matrix model always obeys the Seiberg-Witten (SW) equations on a complex curve defined by singularities of the quasiclassical resolvent. The role of SW differential is played by the exact one-point resolvent. We show that these properties are preserved in generalization of matrix models to beta-ensembles. However, since the integrability and Harer-Zagier topological recursion are still unavailable for beta-ensembles, we need to rely upon the ordinary AMM/EO recursion to evaluate the first terms of the genus expansion. Consideration in this paper is restricted to the Gaussian model.Comment: 15 page