Self-Reachable Chip Configurations on Trees

TL;DR

This paper characterizes self-reachable chip configurations on trees, showing their equivalence classes and providing a recursive formula for counting such configurations, advancing understanding of chip-firing dynamics on trees.

Contribution

It introduces a characterization of self-reachable configurations on trees and derives a recursive enumeration formula for their count.

Findings

All self-reachable configurations with the same number of chips are mutually reachable.

A recursive formula for counting self-reachable configurations on trees.

Characterization of self-reachable configurations on trees.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the notion of a \emph{self-reachable} chip configuration on a simple graph, that is a chip configuration which can be re-obtained from itself after a (nonempty) sequence of vertex firings. In particular, we focus on the case of trees and provide a characterization for such configurations, as well as show that all self-reachable configurations with the same number of chips on a tree are reachable from one another. We conclude with a recursive enumeration formula for the number of self-reachable configurations.