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Domino tilings and flips in dimensions 4 and higher
Klivans, Caroline J.1; Saldanha, Nicolau C.2
1 Division of Applied Mathematics, Box F 182 George Street Brown University Providence, RI 02912 USA
2 Departamento de Matemática, PUC-Rio Rua Marquês de São Vicente 225, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22451-900 Brazil
Algebraic Combinatorics, Volume 5 (2022) no. 1, pp. 163-185.

In this paper we consider domino tilings of bounded regions in dimension n≥4. We define the twist of such a tiling, an elements of ℤ/(2), and prove that it is invariant under flips, a simple local move in the space of tilings.

We investigate which regions 𝒟 are regular, i.e. whenever two tilings t 0 and t 1 of 𝒟×[0,N] have the same twist then t 0 and t 1 can be joined by a sequence of flips provided some extra vertical space is allowed. We prove that all boxes are regular except 𝒟=[0,2] 3 .

Furthermore, given a regular region 𝒟, we show that there exists a value M (depending only on 𝒟) such that if t 0 and t 1 are tilings of equal twist of 𝒟×[0,N] then the corresponding tilings can be joined by a finite sequence of flips in 𝒟×[0,N+M]. As a corollary we deduce that, for regular 𝒟 and large N, the set of tilings of 𝒟×[0,N] has two twin giant components under flips, one for each value of the twist.

Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published online:
DOI: 10.5802/alco.205
Classification: 05B45, 52C20, 52C22, 05C70
Keywords: Higher dimensional tilings, dominoes, dimers

Klivans, Caroline J. 1; Saldanha, Nicolau C. 2

1 Division of Applied Mathematics, Box F 182 George Street Brown University Providence, RI 02912 USA
2 Departamento de Matemática, PUC-Rio Rua Marquês de São Vicente 225, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22451-900 Brazil
License: CC-BY 4.0
Copyrights: The authors retain unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights 
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Klivans, Caroline J.; Saldanha, Nicolau C. Domino tilings and flips in dimensions 4 and higher. Algebraic Combinatorics, Volume 5 (2022) no. 1, pp. 163-185. doi : 10.5802/alco.205. https://alco.centre-mersenne.org/articles/10.5802/alco.205/

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