English

Proportion of chiral maps with automorphism group $\mathcal{S}_n$ and $\mathcal{A}_n$

Group Theory 2026-03-10 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Orientably-regular maps are highly symmetric embeddings of graphs in oriented surfaces. Among them, chiral maps are those which fail to be isomorphic to their mirror images. We prove that, as nn\to\infty, chirality is generic for orientably-regular maps with automorphism groups SnS_n or AnA_n: the proportion of chiral maps tends to 11 in both families. We also obtain the corresponding asymptotic result for orientably-regular hypermaps with automorphism groups SnS_n or AnA_n. A key ingredient is a sharp asymptotic generation statement: if one chooses an involution of SnS_n uniformly at random and then chooses an independent uniformly random element of SnS_n, the probability that these two elements generate SnS_n and AnA_n tends to 34\frac{3}{4} and 14\frac{1}{4} as nn\to\infty, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.08129,
  title  = {Proportion of chiral maps with automorphism group $\mathcal{S}_n$ and $\mathcal{A}_n$},
  author = {Jiyong Chen and Yi Xiao Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08129},
  year   = {2026}
}