Helen Jenne: Combinatorics of the double dimer model

Abstract

In this talk we will discuss a new result about the double-dimer model: under certain conditions, the partition function for double-dimer configurations of a planar bipartite graph satisfies an elegant recurrence, related to the Desnanot-Jacobi identity from linear algebra. A similar identity for the number of dimer configurations (or perfect matchings) of a graph was established nearly 20 years ago by Kuo and others. We will also explain one of the motivations for this work, which is a problem in Donaldson-Thomas and Pandharipande-Thomas theory that will be the subject of a forthcoming paper with Gautam Webb and Ben Young.