Generalizing results of Temperley, Brooks, Smith, Stone and Tutte and others we describe a natural equivalence between three planar objects: weighted bipartite planar graphs; planar Markov chains; and tilings with convex polygons. This equivalence provides a measure-preserving bijection between dimer coverings of a weighted bipartite planar graph and spanning trees on the corresponding Markov chain. The tilings correspond to harmonic functions on the Markov chain and to ``discrete analytic functions'' on the bipartite graph.
The equivalence is extended to infinite periodic graphs, and we classify the resulting ``almost periodic'' tilings and harmonic functions.
We use the periodic Schur process, introduced in arXiv:math/0601019v1, to study the random height function of lozenge tilings (equivalently, dimers) on an infinite cylinder distributed under two variants of the $q^{\operatorname{vol}}$ measure. Under the first variant, corresponding to random cylindric partitions, the height function converges to a deterministic limit shape and fluctuations around it are given by the Gaussian free field in the conformal structure predicted by the Kenyon-Okounkov conjecture. Under the second variant, corresponding to an unrestricted dimer model on the cylinder,…
The combinatorics of tilings of a hexagon of integer side-length $n$ by 120 degree - 60 degree diamonds of side-length 1 has a long history, both directly (as a problem of interest in thermodynamic models) and indirectly (through the equivalence to plane partitions). Formulae as products of factorials have been conjectured and, one by one, proven for the number of such tilings under each of the symmetries of the hexagon. However, when this note was written the entry for the number of distinct such tilings in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) consisted of little more than a ta…
Consider the unit triangular lattice in the plane with origin $O$, drawn so that one of the sets of lattice lines is vertical. Let $l$ and $l'$ denote respectively the vertical and horizontal lines that intersect $O$. Suppose the plane contains a pair of triangular holes of side length two, distributed symmetrically with respect to $l$ and $l'$, and oriented so that both holes point toward $O$. Unit rhombus tilings of three different regions of the plane are considered, namely: tilings of the entire plane; tilings of the half plane that lies to the left of $l$ (where $l$ is considered a free b…
We show how to compute the probability of any given local configuration in a random tiling of the plane with dominos. That is, we explicitly compute the measures of cylinder sets for the measure of maximal entropy $μ$ on the space of tilings of the plane with dominos. We construct a measure $ν$ on the set of lozenge tilings of the plane, show that its entropy is the topological entropy, and compute explicitly the $ν$-measures of cylinder sets. As applications of these results, we prove that the translation action is strongly mixing for $μ$ and $ν$, and compute the rate of convergence to mixing…
Symmetric Dyck tilings and ballot tilings are certain tilings in the region surrounded by two ballot paths. We study the relations of combinatorial objects which are bijective to symmetric Dyck tilings such as labeled trees, Hermite histories, and perfect matchings. We also introduce two operations on labeled trees for symmetric Dyck tilings: symmetric Dyck tiling strip (symDTS) and symmetric Dyck tiling ribbon (symDTR). We give two definitions of Hermite histories for symmetric Dyck tilings, and show that they are equivalent by use of the correspondence between symDTS operation and an Hermite…
We prove that the number of monomer-dimer tilings of an $n\times n$ square grid, with $m<n$ monomers in which no four tiles meet at any point is $m2^m+(m+1)2^{m+1}$, when $m$ and $n$ have the same parity. In addition, we present a new proof of the result that there are $n2^{n-1}$ such tilings with $n$ monomers, which divides the tilings into $n$ classes of size $2^{n-1}$. The sum of these tilings over all monomer counts has the closed form $2^{n-1}(3n-4)+2$ and, curiously, this is equal to the sum of the squares of all parts in all compositions of $n$. We also describe two algorithms and a Gra…
We formulate and prove a variational principle (in the sense of thermodynamics) for random domino tilings, or equivalently for the dimer model on a square grid. This principle states that a typical tiling of an arbitrary finite region can be described by a function that maximizes an entropy integral. We associate an entropy to every sort of local behavior domino tilings can exhibit, and prove that almost all tilings lie within epsilon (for an appropriate metric) of the unique entropy-maximizing solution. This gives a solution to the dimer problem with fully general boundary conditions, thereby…
We consider the dimer problem on a non-bipartite graph $G$, where there are two types of dimers one of which we regard impurities. Results of simulations using Markov chain seem to indicate that impurities are tend to distribute on the boundary, which we set as a conjecture. We first show that there is a bijection between the set of dimer coverings on $G$ and the set of spanning forests on two graphs which are made from $G$, with configuration of impurities satisfying a pairing condition. This bijection can be regarded as a extension of the Temperley bijection. We consider local move consistin…
Dyck tilings are certain tilings in the region surrounded by two Dyck paths. We study bijections and combinatorial objects bijective to Dyck tilings, which include Dyck tiling strip (DTS) and Dyck tiling ribbon (DTR) bijections, increasing and decreasing trees, Hermite histories, Dyck tableaux and tree-like tableaux. Dyck tableaux and tree-like tableaux are originally defined for a zigzag path, or equivalently a permutation. We generalize them to the case of general Dyck paths. We show that the most properties of Dyck tableaux can be generalized to the generic case, and show some enumerative r…
This paper studies the dimer model on the dual graph of the square-octagon lattice, which can be viewed as the domino tilings with impurities in some sense. In particular, under a certain boundary condition, we give an exact formula representing the probability of finding an impurity at a given site in a uniformly random dimer configuration in terms of simple random walks on the square lattice.
We study enumerations of Dyck and ballot tilings, which are tilings of a region determined by two Dyck or ballot paths. We give bijective proofs to two formulae of enumerations of Dyck tilings through Hermite histories. We show that one of the formulae is equal to a certain Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomial. For a ballot tiling, we establish formulae which are analogues of formulae for Dyck tilings. Especially, the generating functions have factorized expressions. The key tool is a planted plane tree and its increasing labellings. We also introduce a generalized perfect matching which is bijective t…
The deductive method ruled mathematics for the last 2500 years, now it is the turn of the inductive method. Here we make a modest start by using the inductive method to discover and prove (rigorously) explicit generating functions for the number of dimer (and monomer-dimer) tilings of large families of "skinny" plane regions.
We introduce a general model of dimer coverings of certain plane bipartite graphs, which we call rail yard graphs (RYG). The transfer matrices used to compute the partition function are shown to be isomorphic to certain operators arising in the so-called boson-fermion correspondence. This allows to reformulate the RYG dimer model as a Schur process, i.e. as a random sequence of integer partitions subject to some interlacing conditions. Beyond the computation of the partition function, we provide an explicit expression for all correlation functions or, equivalently, for the inverse Kasteleyn ma…
We introduce and study cover-inclusive and cover-exclusive Dyck tilings of type $D$. It is shown that the generating functions of Dyck tilings of type $D$ are expressed in terms of the generating function of ballot tilings of type $B$. We introduce link patterns of type $D$ and plane trees for a ballot path, and construct a map from trees to $\mathbb{Z}[q]$. This map gives the generating function of cover-inclusive Dyck tilings of type $D$ associated to the ballot path.
Cover-inclusive Dyck tilings are tilings of skew Young diagrams with ribbon tiles shaped like Dyck paths, in which tiles are no larger than the tiles they cover. These tilings arise in the study of certain statistical physics models and also Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials. We give two bijections between cover-inclusive Dyck tilings and linear extensions of tree posets. The first bijection maps the statistic (area + tiles)/2 to inversions of the linear extension, and the second bijection maps the "discrepancy" between the upper and lower boundary of the tiling to descents of the linear extension.
We consider triangular holes on the hexagonal lattice and we study their interaction when the rest of the lattice is covered by dimers. More precisely, we analyze the joint correlation of these triangular holes in a ``sea'' of dimers. We determine the asymptotics of the joint correlation (for large separations between the holes) in the case when one of the holes has side 1, all remaining holes have side 2, and the holes are distributed symmetrically with respect to a symmetry axis. Our result has a striking physical interpretation. If we regard the holes as electrical charges, with charge equa…
We study the number of tilings of skew Young diagrams by ribbon tiles shaped like Dyck paths, in which the tiles are "vertically decreasing". We use these quantities to compute pairing probabilities in the double-dimer model: Given a planar bipartite graph $G$ with special vertices, called nodes, on the outer face, the double-dimer model is formed by the superposition of a uniformly random dimer configuration (perfect matching) of $G$ together with a random dimer configuration of the graph formed from $G$ by deleting the nodes. The double-dimer configuration consists of loops, doubled edges, a…
We define a notion of tiling of the full infinite $p$-ary tree, establishing a series of equivalent criteria for a subtree to be a tile, each of a different nature; namely, geometric, algebraic, graph-theoretic, order-theoretic, and topological. We show how these results can be applied in a straightforward and constructive manner to define homeomorphisms between two given spaces of $p$-adic integers, $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{q}$, endowed with their corresponding standard non-archimedean metric topologies.
As part of our ongoing work on the enumeration of symmetry classes of lozenge tilings of hexagons with certain four-lobed structures removed from their center, we consider the case of the tilings which are both vertically and horizontally symmetric. In order to handle this, we need an extension of Kuo's graphical condensation method, which works in the presence of free boundary. Our results allow us to compute exactly the correlation in a sea of dimers of a macroscopic dent in a 90 degree wedge with mixed boundary conditions. We use previous results to compute the correlation of the correspond…
We prove that the partition function for tripartite double-dimer configurations of a planar bipartite graph satisfies a recurrence related to the Desnanot-Jacobi identity from linear algebra. A similar identity for the dimer partition function was established nearly 20 years ago by Kuo and has applications to random tiling theory and the theory of cluster algebras. This work was motivated in part by the potential for applications in these areas. Additionally, we discuss an application to Donaldson-Thomas and Pandharipande-Thomas theory which will be the subject of a forthcoming paper. The proo…
A grove is a spanning forest of a planar graph in which every component tree contains at least one of a special subset of vertices on the outer face called nodes. For the natural probability measure on groves, we compute various connection probabilities for the nodes in a random grove. In particular, for "tripartite" pairings of the nodes, the probability can be computed as a Pfaffian in the entries of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann matrix (discrete Hilbert transform) of the graph. These formulas generalize the determinant formulas given by Curtis, Ingerman, and Morrow, and by Fomin, for parallel pa…
A new method for constructing self-referential tilings of Euclidean space from a graph directed iterated function system, based on a combinatorial structure we call a pre-tree, is introduced. In the special case that we refer to as balanced, the resulting tilings have a finite set of prototiles, are quasiperiodic but not periodic, and are self-similar. A necessary and sufficient condition for two balanced tilings to be congruent is provided.
An \emph{auspicious tatami mat arrangement} is a tiling of a rectilinear region with two types of tiles, $1 \times 2$ tiles (dimers) and $1 \times 1$ tiles (monomers). The tiles must cover the region and satisfy the constraint that no four corners of the tiles meet; such tilings are called \emph{tatami tilings}. The main focus of this paper is when the rectilinear region is a rectangle. We provide a structural characterization of rectangular tatami tilings and use it to prove that the tiling is completely determined by the tiles that are on its border. We prove that the number of tatami tiling…
We show that certain topologically defined uniform spanning tree probabilities for graphs embedded in an annulus can be computed as linear combinations of Pfaffians of matrices involving the line-bundle Green's function, where the coefficients count cover-inclusive Dyck tilings of skew Young diagrams.
Given a finite planar graph, a grove is a spanning forest in which every component tree contains one or more of a specified set of vertices (called nodes) on the outer face. For the uniform measure on groves, we compute the probabilities of the different possible node connections in a grove. These probabilities only depend on boundary measurements of the graph and not on the actual graph structure, i.e., the probabilities can be expressed as functions of the pairwise electrical resistances between the nodes, or equivalently, as functions of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator (or response matrix…
The purpose of this note is to give a succinct summary of some basic properties of T-graphs which arise in the study of the dimer model. We focus in particular on the relation between the dimer model on the heaxgonal lattice with a given slope, and the behaviour of the uniform spanning tree on the associated T-graph. Together with the main result of the companion paper \cite{BLR16}, the results here show Gaussian free field fluctuations for the height function in some dimer models.
We investigate the integrability of the discrete non-linear equation governing the dependence on geodesic distance of planar graphs with inner vertices of even valences. This equation follows from a bijection between graphs and blossom trees and is expressed in terms of generating functions for random walks. We construct explicitly an infinite set of conserved quantities for this equation, also involving suitable combinations of random walk generating functions. The proof of their conservation, i.e. their eventual independence on the geodesic distance, relies on the connection between random w…
In this paper, we study the lattice properties of posets of torsion pairs in the module category of a family of representation-finite gentle algebras called tiling algebras, introduced by Coelho Simoes and Parsons. We present a combinatorial model for torsion pairs using polyogonal subdivisions of a convex polygon. We use this model and the lattice theory to classify 2-term simple-minded collections in the bounded derived category of the corresponding tiling algebra. As a consequence, we obtain a characterization of c-matrices for any quiver mutation-equivalent to a type A Dynkin quiver. Our m…
Boltzmann samplers and the recursive method are prominent algorithmic frameworks for the approximate-size and exact-size random generation of large combinatorial structures, such as maps, tilings, RNA sequences or various tree-like structures. In their multiparametric variants, these samplers allow to control the profile of expected values corresponding to multiple combinatorial parameters. One can control, for instance, the number of leaves, profile of node degrees in trees or the number of certain subpatterns in strings. However, such a flexible control requires an additional non-trivial tun…
We study partition functions for the dimer model on families of finite graphs converging to infinite self-similar graphs and forming approximation sequences to certain well-known fractals. The graphs that we consider are provided by actions of finitely generated groups by automorphisms on rooted trees, and thus their edges are naturally labeled by the generators of the group. It is thus natural to consider weight functions on these graphs taking different values according to the labeling. We study in detail the well-known example of the Hanoi Towers group $H^{(3)}$, closely related to the Sier…
We introduce an object called a tree growing sequence (TGS) in an effort to generalize bijective correspondences between $G$-parking functions, spanning trees, and the set of monomials in the Tutte polynomial of a graph $G$. A tree growing sequence determines an algorithm which can be applied to a single function, or to the set $\mathcal{P}_{G,q}$ of $G$-parking functions. When the latter is chosen, the algorithm uses splitting operations - inspired by the recursive defintion of the Tutte polynomial - to iteratively break $\mathcal{P}_{G,q}$ into disjoint subsets. This results in bijective map…
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学数学与统计学院）；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Berlin Mathematical School（柏林数学学院）；School of Mathematics, Shandong University（山东大学数学学院）；Data Science Institute, Shandong University（山东大学数据科学研究院）
e-Valuate is a game on arithmetic expressions. The players have contrasting roles of maximizing and minimizing the given expression. The maximizer proposes values and the minimizer substitutes them for variables of his choice. When the expression is fully instantiated, its value is compared with a certain minimax value that would result if the players played to their optimal strategies. The winner is declared based on this comparison. We use a game tree to represent the state of the game and show how the minimax value can be computed efficiently using backward induction and alpha-beta pruning.…
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…
