Laminations of a graph on a pair of pants
Abstract
A lamination of a graph embedded on a surface is a collection of pairwise disjoint non-contractible simple closed curves drawn on the graph. In the case when the surface is a sphere with three punctures (a.k.a. a pair of pants), we first identify the lamination space of a graph embedded on that surface as a lattice polytope, then we characterize the polytopes that arise as the lamination space of some graph on a pair of pants. This characterizes the image of a purely topological version of the spectral map for the vector bundle Laplacian for a flat connection on a pair of pants. The proof uses a graph exploration technique akin to the peeling of planar maps.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1804.01968,
title = {Laminations of a graph on a pair of pants},
author = {Sanjay Ramassamy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.01968},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
17 pages, 8 figures. Final version to appear in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society