Graphs on Surfaces and the Partition Function of String Theory

J. Manuel Garcia-Islas

Published 2007-10-01, updated 2008-04-21Version 2

Graphs on surfaces is an active topic of pure mathematics belonging to graph theory. It has also been applied to physics and relates discrete and continuous mathematics. In this paper we present a formal mathematical description of the relation between graph theory and the mathematical physics of discrete string theory. In this description we present problems of the combinatorial world of real importance for graph theorists. The mathematical details of the paper are as follows: There is a combinatorial description of the partition function of bosonic string theory. In this combinatorial description the string world sheet is thought as simplicial and it is considered as a combinatorial graph. It can also be said that we have embeddings of graphs in closed surfaces. The discrete partition function which results from this procedure gives a sum over triangulations of closed surfaces. This is known as the vacuum partition function. The precise calculation of the partition function depends on combinatorial calculations involving counting all non-isomorphic triangulations and all spanning trees of a graph. The exact computation of the partition function turns out to be very complicated, however we show the exact expressions for its computation for the case of any closed orientable surface. We present a clear computation for the sphere and the way it is done for the torus, and for the non-orientable case of the projective plane.