Witten Complex of Transitive Digraph and Its Convergence

Abstract

Digraphs are generalization of graphs in which each edge is given one or two directions. For each digraph, there exists a transitive digraph containing it. Moreover, all the formal linear combinations of allowed elementary paths form a basis of the path complex for a transitive digraph. Hence, the study of discrete Morse theory on transitive digraphs is very important for the further study of discrete Morse theory on general digraphs. As we know, the definition of discrete Morse function on a digraph is different from that on a simplical complex or a cell complex: each discrete Morse function on a digraph is a discrete flat Witten-Morse function. In this paper, we deform the usual boundary operator, replacing it with a boundary operator with parameters and consider the induced Laplace operators. In addition, we consider the eigenvectors of the eigenvalues of the Laplace operator that approach to zero when the parameters approach infinity, define the generation space of these eigenvectors, and further give the Witten complex of digraphs. Finally, we prove that for a transitive digraph, Witten complex approaches to its Morse complex. However, for general digraphs, the structure of Morse complex is not as simple as that of transitive digraphs and the critical path is not directly related to the eigenvector with zero eigenvalue of Laplace operator. This is explained in the last part of the paper.