The medial graph and voltage- current duality

Abstract

The theories of current graphs and voltage graphs give powerful methods for constructing graph embeddings and branched coverings of surfaces. Gross and Alpert first showed that these two theories were dual, that is, that a current assignment on an embedded graph was equivalent to a voltage assignment on the embedded dual. In this paper we examine current and voltage graphs in the context of the medial graph, a 4-regular graph formed from an embedded graph which encodes both the primal and dual graphs. As a consequence we obtain new insights into voltage-current duality, including wrapped coverings. We also develop a method for simultaneously giving a voltage and a current assignment on an embedded graph in the case that the voltage-current group is abelian. We apply this technique to construct self-dual embeddings for a variety of graphs. We also construct orientable and non-orientable embeddings of K p, q with dual K r, s for all possible p, q, r, s even with pq = rs.