In this post, I’d like to sketch some of the interesting results contained in my Ph.D. student Spencer Backman’s new paper “Riemann-Roch theory for graph orientations”.

First, a bit of background.  In a 2007 paper, Emeric Gioan introduced the cycle-cocycle reversal system on a (finite, connected, unoriented) graph G, which is a certain natural equivalence relation on the set of orientations of G.  Recall that an orientation of G is the choice of a direction for each edge.  A cycle flip on an orientation consists of reversing all the edges in a directed cycle in .  Similarly, a cocycle flip consists of reversing all the edges in a directed cocycle in , where a directed cocycle (also called a directed cut) is the collection of all oriented edges connecting a subset of vertices of G to its complement.  The cycle-cocycle reversal system is the equivalence relation on the set of orientations of G generated by all cycle and cocycle flips.  In his paper, Gioan proves (via a deletion-contraction recursion) the surprising fact that the number of equivalence classes equals the number of spanning trees in G.  A bijective proof of this result was subsequently obtained by Bernardi. Continue reading →