EW-tableaux, permutations and recurrent configurations of the sandpile model on Ferrers graphs

Seminar/Forum

213
Peter Hall

The Abelian sandpile model (ASM) is a dynamic process on a graph. More specifically, it is a Markov chain on the set of configurations on that graph. Of particular interest are the recurrent configurations, i.e. those that appear infinitely often in the long-time running of the model. We study the ASM on Ferrers graphs, a class of bipartite graphs in one-to-one correspondence with Ferrers diagrams. We show that minimal recurrent configurations are in one-to-one correspondence with a set of certain 0/1 fillings of the Ferrers diagrams introduced by Ehrenborg and van Willigensburg. We refer to these fillings as EW-tableaux, and establish a bijection between the set of EW-tableaux of a given Ferrers diagram and a set of permutations whose descent bottoms are given by the shape of the Ferrers diagram. This induces a bijection between these permutations and minimal recurrent configurations of the ASM. We enrich this bijection to encode all recurrent configurations, via a decoration of the corresponding permutation. We also show that the set of recurrent configurations over all Ferrers graphs of a given size are in bijection with the set of alternating (or local binary search) trees of that size.

Presenter

• Thomas Selig, University of Strathclyde