Sandpile groups and spanning trees of directed line graphs

We generalize a theorem of Knuth relating the oriented spanning trees of a directed graph G and its directed line graph LG. The sandpile group is an abelian group associated to a directed graph, whose order is the number of oriented spanning trees rooted at a fixed vertex. In the case when G is regular of degree k, we show that the sandpile group of G is isomorphic to the quotient of the sandpile group of LG by its k-torsion subgroup. As a corollary we compute the sandpile groups of two families of graphs widely studied in computer science, the de Bruijn graphs and Kautz graphs.Comment: v2 has an expanded section on deletion/contraction for directed graphs, and a more detailed proof of Theorem 2.3. To appear in Journal of Combinatorial Theory A

Automorphisms of necklaces and sandpile groups

We introduce a group naturally acting on aperiodic necklaces of length $n$ with two colours using the 1--1 correspondences between aperiodic necklaces and irreducible polynomials over the field \F_2 of two elements. We notice that this group is isomorphic to the quotient group of non-degenerate circulant matrices of size $n$ over that field modulo a natural cyclic subgroup. Our groups turn out to be isomorphic to the sandpile groups for a special sequence of directed graphs.Comment: 12 pages, several tables, no picture