The structure of sandpile groups of outerplanar graphs

Abstract

We compute the sandpile groups of families of planar graphs having a common weak dual by evaluating the indeterminates of the critical ideals of the weak dual at the lengths of the cycles bounding the interior faces. This method allows us to determine the algebraic structure of the sandpile groups of outerplanar graphs, and can be used to compute the sandpile groups of many other planar graph families. Finally, we compute the identity element for the sandpile groups of the dual graphs of many outerplane graphs.