168 research outputs found
Trees and Matchings
In this article, Temperley's bijection between spanning trees of the square
grid on the one hand, and perfect matchings (also known as dimer coverings) of
the square grid on the other, is extended to the setting of general planar
directed (and undirected) graphs, where edges carry nonnegative weights that
induce a weighting on the set of spanning trees. We show that the weighted,
directed spanning trees (often called arborescences) of any planar graph G can
be put into a one-to-one weight-preserving correspondence with the perfect
matchings of a related planar graph H.
One special case of this result is a bijection between perfect matchings of
the hexagonal honeycomb lattice and directed spanning trees of a triangular
lattice. Another special case gives a correspondence between perfect matchings
of the ``square-octagon'' lattice and directed weighted spanning trees on a
directed weighted version of the cartesian lattice.
In conjunction with results of Kenyon, our main theorem allows us to compute
the measures of all cylinder events for random spanning trees on any (directed,
weighted) planar graph. Conversely, in cases where the perfect matching model
arises from a tree model, Wilson's algorithm allows us to quickly generate
random samples of perfect matchings.Comment: 32 pages, 19 figures (minor revisions from version 1
Enumeration of Matchings: Problems and Progress
This document is built around a list of thirty-two problems in enumeration of
matchings, the first twenty of which were presented in a lecture at MSRI in the
fall of 1996. I begin with a capsule history of the topic of enumeration of
matchings. The twenty original problems, with commentary, comprise the bulk of
the article. I give an account of the progress that has been made on these
problems as of this writing, and include pointers to both the printed and
on-line literature; roughly half of the original twenty problems were solved by
participants in the MSRI Workshop on Combinatorics, their students, and others,
between 1996 and 1999. The article concludes with a dozen new open problems.
(Note: This article supersedes math.CO/9801060 and math.CO/9801061.)Comment: 1+37 pages; to appear in "New Perspectives in Geometric
Combinatorics" (ed. by Billera, Bjorner, Green, Simeon, and Stanley),
Mathematical Science Research Institute publication #37, Cambridge University
Press, 199
How quickly can we sample a uniform domino tiling of the 2L x 2L square via Glauber dynamics?
TThe prototypical problem we study here is the following. Given a square, there are approximately ways to tile it with
dominos, i.e. with horizontal or vertical rectangles, where
is Catalan's constant [Kasteleyn '61, Temperley-Fisher '61]. A
conceptually simple (even if computationally not the most efficient) way of
sampling uniformly one among so many tilings is to introduce a Markov Chain
algorithm (Glauber dynamics) where, with rate , two adjacent horizontal
dominos are flipped to vertical dominos, or vice-versa. The unique invariant
measure is the uniform one and a classical question [Wilson
2004,Luby-Randall-Sinclair 2001] is to estimate the time it takes to
approach equilibrium (i.e. the running time of the algorithm). In
[Luby-Randall-Sinclair 2001, Randall-Tetali 2000], fast mixin was proven:
for some finite . Here, we go much beyond and show that . Our result applies to rather general domain
shapes (not just the square), provided that the typical height
function associated to the tiling is macroscopically planar in the large
limit, under the uniform measure (this is the case for instance for the
Temperley-type boundary conditions considered in [Kenyon 2000]). Also, our
method extends to some other types of tilings of the plane, for instance the
tilings associated to dimer coverings of the hexagon or square-hexagon
lattices.Comment: to appear on PTRF; 42 pages, 9 figures; v2: typos corrected,
references adde
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