Growth rates of groups associated with face 2-coloured triangulations and directed Eulerian digraphs on the sphere (Q278890)

Summary: Let \(\mathcal{G}\) be a properly face \(2\)-coloured (say black and white) piecewise-linear triangulation of the sphere with vertex set \(V\). Consider the abelian group \(\mathcal{A}_W\) generated by the set \(V\), with relations \(r+c+s=0\) for all white triangles with vertices \(r\), \(c\) and \(s\). The group \(\mathcal{A}_B\) can be defined similarly, using black triangles. These groups are related in the following manner \(\mathcal{A}_W\cong\mathcal{A}_B\cong\mathbb{Z}\oplus\mathbb{Z}\oplus\mathcal{C}\) where \(\mathcal{C}\) is a finite abelian group.{ }The finite torsion subgroup \(\mathcal{C}\) is referred to as the canonical group of the triangulation. Let \(m_t\) be the maximal order of \(\mathcal{C}\) over all properly face 2-coloured spherical triangulations with \(t\) triangles of each colour. By relating such a triangulation to certain directed Eulerian~spherical embeddings of digraphs whose abelian sand-pile groups are isomorphic to the triangulation's canonical group we provide improved upper and lower bounds for \(\lim \sup_{t\to\infty}(m_t)^{1/t}\).