Cut-and-project graphs and other complexes

Abstract

The cut-and-project method may be applied to graphs and complexes, although there are technical difficulties, most notably “collisions,” i.e. when the images (under the projection) of two disjoint edges or cells intersect. Given a particular periodic structure, a particular projection space, an appropriate “window” in the orthogonal complement of that space, the induced substructure within the cartesian product of the window and the projection space is projected to the projection space to produce a “model structure.” We may use an index space of vectors from the orthogonal complement to move the window around and obtain a “model system” of model structures. We adapt the notion of “general position” to higher dimensions: the projection space is in “doubly general position” with respect to a graph or complex when the projection of that structure maps vertices of that structure injectively into the projection space and the edges or polytopes of that structure injectively so that their dimension is not reduced and disjoint edges and polytopes remain disjoint. We find that if the initial structure was a periodic graph, if the projection space and its complement are in general position with respect to the vertices and edges, and the window is also in general position, then the model system has uncountably many isomorphism classes - with distinct coordination sequences.