Blossoming bijection for higher-genus maps

Abstract

In 1997, Schaeffer described a bijection between Eulerian planar maps and some trees. In this work we generalize his work to a bijection between bicolorable maps on a surface of any fixed genus and some unicellular maps with the same genus. An important step of this construction is to exhibit a canonical orientation for maps, that allows to apply the same local opening algorithm as Schaeffer. As an important byproduct, we obtain the first bijective proof of a result of Bender and Canfield from 1991, when they proved that the generating series of maps in higher genus is a rational function of the generating series of planar maps.