Average Hitting Times and Recurrence Structures I: Powers of Cycle Graphs

We investigate the average hitting times of simple random walks on the $k$-th power graph $C_N^k$ of the cycle graph $C_N$. First, we show that the average hitting times are characterized by a difference equation corresponding to the graph Laplacian. Next, by using the cyclic symmetry of $C_N^k$, we derive a spectral representation via Fourier analysis. Furthermore, by applying factorization and partial fraction decomposition of the corresponding difference operator, we obtain an explicit formula for the average hitting times consisting of a quadratic term and finitely many correction terms. These correction terms are described by second-order linear recurrence sequences associated with the characteristic polynomials, and can be regarded as natural generalizations of Fibonacci-type sequences. As a consequence, our formulas recover the known results for cycle graphs and squares of cycle graphs in a unified way. Moreover, from the formulas obtained for average hitting times, we derive explicit formulas for the effective resistances, the numbers of spanning trees, the numbers of two-component spanning forests, and the numbers of spanning trees of vertex-identified graphs. In particular, for the third power graph $C_N^3$ of the cycle graph, all of these quantities are written explicitly in terms of complex conjugate Fibonacci-type sequences. Our results clarify structural relations between random walk quantities and combinatorial quantities on cycle power graphs.