2,529 research outputs found
Simplicial and Cellular Trees
Much information about a graph can be obtained by studying its spanning
trees. On the other hand, a graph can be regarded as a 1-dimensional cell
complex, raising the question of developing a theory of trees in higher
dimension. As observed first by Bolker, Kalai and Adin, and more recently by
numerous authors, the fundamental topological properties of a tree --- namely
acyclicity and connectedness --- can be generalized to arbitrary dimension as
the vanishing of certain cellular homology groups. This point of view is
consistent with the matroid-theoretic approach to graphs, and yields
higher-dimensional analogues of classical enumerative results including
Cayley's formula and the matrix-tree theorem. A subtlety of the
higher-dimensional case is that enumeration must account for the possibility of
torsion homology in trees, which is always trivial for graphs. Cellular trees
are the starting point for further high-dimensional extensions of concepts from
algebraic graph theory including the critical group, cut and flow spaces, and
discrete dynamical systems such as the abelian sandpile model.Comment: 39 pages (including 5-page bibliography); 5 figures. Chapter for
forthcoming IMA volume "Recent Trends in Combinatorics
Cellular spanning trees and Laplacians of cubical complexes
We prove a Matrix-Tree Theorem enumerating the spanning trees of a cell
complex in terms of the eigenvalues of its cellular Laplacian operators,
generalizing a previous result for simplicial complexes. As an application, we
obtain explicit formulas for spanning tree enumerators and Laplacian
eigenvalues of cubes; the latter are integers. We prove a weighted version of
the eigenvalue formula, providing evidence for a conjecture on weighted
enumeration of cubical spanning trees. We introduce a cubical analogue of
shiftedness, and obtain a recursive formula for the Laplacian eigenvalues of
shifted cubical complexes, in particular, these eigenvalues are also integers.
Finally, we recover Adin's enumeration of spanning trees of a complete colorful
simplicial complex from the cellular Matrix-Tree Theorem together with a result
of Kook, Reiner and Stanton.Comment: 24 pages, revised version, to appear in Advances in Applied
Mathematic
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