Enumerative Gadget Phenomena for $(4,1)$-Adinkras

Abstract

Adinkras are combinatorial objects developed to study supersymmetry representations. Gates et al. introduced the "gadget" as a function of pairs of adinkras, obtaining some mysterious results for $(n=4, k=1)$ adinkras with computer-aided computation. Specifically, very few values of the gadget actually appear, suggesting a great deal of symmetry in these objects. In this paper, we compute gadgets symbolically and explain some of these observed phenomena with group theory and combinatorics. Guided by this work, we give some suggestions for generalizations of the gadget to other values of the $n$ and $k$ parameters.