Distribution of Sandpile groups of random bipartite graphs

Abstract

Fix a prime $p$ and a constant $\frac{1}{p}<\alpha\leq 1$. Consider the random Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi bipartite graph $G_{\alpha}(n,u)$ with bipartition $(V_1,V_2)$ of sizes $|V_1|=n$ and $|V_2|=\lceil\alpha n\rceil$, and edge probability $0<u<1$. The authors of [1] and [8] conjectured a limiting distribution for the $p$-Sylow subgroup of the sandpile group of $G_{\alpha}(n,u)$ as $n\to\infty$. We prove this conjecture for odd primes $p$. Similar results have previously been proved by computing the expected number of surjections from the random abelian $p$-group to $H$, for each finite abelian $p$-group $H$. However, in our setting, these surjective moments often diverge to infinity, despite the conjectured limiting distribution having finite moments. We resolve this issue by discarding the graphs for which too many vertices have degrees divisible by $p$. Once we remove the contribution of this rare set of graphs, then the surjective moments converge to the expected values. When $p$ is odd, applying Wood's universality theorem yields the desired convergence in distribution. For $p=2$, our computed moments (after excluding the rare set of graphs) match those of the conjectured distribution. However, these moments do not uniquely determine a distribution.