Which Digraphs with Ring Structure are Essentially Cyclic?

We say that a digraph is essentially cyclic if its Laplacian spectrum is not completely real. The essential cyclicity implies the presence of directed cycles, but not vice versa. The problem of characterizing essential cyclicity in terms of graph topology is difficult and yet unsolved. Its solution is important for some applications of graph theory, including that in decentralized control. In the present paper, this problem is solved with respect to the class of digraphs with ring structure, which models some typical communication networks. It is shown that the digraphs in this class are essentially cyclic, except for certain specified digraphs. The main technical tool we employ is the Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind. A by-product of this study is a theorem on the zeros of polynomials that differ by one from the products of Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind. We also consider the problem of essential cyclicity for weighted digraphs and enumerate the spanning trees in some digraphs with ring structure.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, Advances in Applied Mathematics: accepted for publication (2010) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aam.2010.01.00

Partitioning de Bruijn Graphs into Fixed-Length Cycles for Robot Identification and Tracking

We propose a new camera-based method of robot identification, tracking and orientation estimation. The system utilises coloured lights mounted in a circle around each robot to create unique colour sequences that are observed by a camera. The number of robots that can be uniquely identified is limited by the number of colours available, $q$, the number of lights on each robot, $k$, and the number of consecutive lights the camera can see, $\ell$. For a given set of parameters, we would like to maximise the number of robots that we can use. We model this as a combinatorial problem and show that it is equivalent to finding the maximum number of disjoint $k$-cycles in the de Bruijn graph $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$. We provide several existence results that give the maximum number of cycles in $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ in various cases. For example, we give an optimal solution when $k=q^{\ell-1}$. Another construction yields many cycles in larger de Bruijn graphs using cycles from smaller de Bruijn graphs: if $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ can be partitioned into $k$-cycles, then $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ can be partitioned into $tk$-cycles for any divisor $t$ of $k$. The methods used are based on finite field algebra and the combinatorics of words.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Discrete Applied Mathematic

Eulerian digraphs and toric Calabi-Yau varieties

We investigate the structure of a simple class of affine toric Calabi-Yau varieties that are defined from quiver representations based on finite eulerian directed graphs (digraphs). The vanishing first Chern class of these varieties just follows from the characterisation of eulerian digraphs as being connected with all vertices balanced. Some structure theory is used to show how any eulerian digraph can be generated by iterating combinations of just a few canonical graph-theoretic moves. We describe the effect of each of these moves on the lattice polytopes which encode the toric Calabi-Yau varieties and illustrate the construction in several examples. We comment on physical applications of the construction in the context of moduli spaces for superconformal gauged linear sigma models.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

An extensive English language bibliography on graph theory and its applications, supplement 1

Graph theory and its applications - bibliography, supplement

A problem on partial sums in abelian groups

In this paper we propose a conjecture concerning partial sums of an arbitrary finite subset of an abelian group, that naturally arises investigating simple Heffter systems. Then, we show its connection with related open problems and we present some results about the validity of these conjectures

Regular configurations and TBR graphs

PhD 2009 QMThis thesis consists of two parts: The first one is concerned with the theory and applications of regular configurations; the second one is devoted to TBR graphs. In the first part, a new approach is proposed to study regular configurations, an extremal arrangement of necklaces formed by a given number of red beads and black beads. We first show that this concept is closely related to several other concepts studied in the literature, such as balanced words, maximally even sets, and the ground states in the Kawasaki-Ising model. Then we apply regular configurations to solve the (vertex) cycle packing problem for shift digraphs, a family of Cayley digraphs. TBR is one of widely used tree rearrangement operationes, and plays an important role in heuristic algorithms for phylogenetic tree reconstruction. In the second part of this thesis we study various properties of TBR graphs, a family of graphs associated with the TBR operation. To investigate the degree distribution of the TBR graphs, we also study -index, a concept introduced to measure the shape of trees. As an interesting by-product, we obtain a structural characterization of good trees, a well-known family of trees that generalizes the complete binary trees