English

Necklaces over a group with identity product

Combinatorics 2025-12-25 v3 Group Theory

Abstract

We address two variants of the classical necklace counting problem from enumerative combinatorics. In both cases, we fix a finite group G\mathcal{G} and a positive integer nn. In the first variant, we count the ``identity-product nn-necklaces'' -- that is, the orbits of nn-tuples (a1,a2,,an)Gn\left(a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_n\right) \in \mathcal{G}^n that satisfy a1a2an=1a_1 a_2 \cdots a_n = 1 under cyclic rotation. In the second, we count the orbits of all nn-tuples (a1,a2,,an)Gn\left(a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_n\right) \in \mathcal{G}^n under cyclic rotation and left multiplication (i.e., the operation of G\mathcal{G} on Gn\mathcal{G}^n given by h(a1,a2,,an)=(ha1,ha2,,han)h \cdot \left(a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_n\right) = \left(ha_1, ha_2, \ldots, ha_n\right)). We prove bijectively that both answers are the same, and express them as a sum over divisors of nn. Consequently, we generalize the first problem to nn-necklaces whose product of entries lies in a given subset of G\mathcal{G} (closed under conjugation), and we connect a particular case to the enumeration of irreducible polynomials over a finite field with given degree and second-highest coefficient 00.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.08937,
  title  = {Necklaces over a group with identity product},
  author = {Darij Grinberg and Peter Mao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08937},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

34 pages. v3 fixes some typos and improves the wording slightly. Comments are welcome!

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:27:32.147Z