The gonality of circulant graphs
Abstract
The gonality of a graph measures how difficult it is to move chips around the entirety of a graph according to certain chip-firing rules without introducing debt. In this paper we study the gonality of circulant graphs, a class of vertex-transitive graphs that can be specified by their number of vertices together with a list of cyclic adjacency relations satisfied by all vertices. We provide a universal upper bound on the gonality of all circulant graphs with a fixed adjacency list, which holds irrespective of the number of vertices. We use this upper bound together with computational methods to determine that the gonality of the -regular Harary graph on vertices is for . As a special case, this gives the gonality of sufficiently large antiprism graphs to be .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.05761,
title = {The gonality of circulant graphs},
author = {Lisa Cenek and Lizzie Ferguson and Eyobel Gebre and Cassandra Marcussen and Jason Meintjes and Ralph Morrison and Liz Ostermeyer and Shefali Ramakrishna},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.05761},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures