The pebbling threshold spectrum and paths

Abstract

Given a distribution of pebbles on the vertices of a graph, say that we can pebble a vertex if a pebble is left on it after some sequence of moves, each of which takes two pebbles from some vertex and places one on an adjacent vertex. A distribution is solvable if all vertices are pebblable; the pebbling threshold of a sequence of graphs is, roughly speaking, the total number of pebbles for which random distributions with that number of pebbles on a graph in the sequence change from being almost never solvable to being almost always solvable. We show that any sequence of connected graphs with strictly increasing orders always has some pebbling threshold which is $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ and $O(2^{\sqrt{2 \log_2 n}} n/\sqrt{\log_2 n})$, and that it is possible to construct such a sequence of connected graphs which has any desired pebbling threshold between these bounds. (Here, $n$ is the order of a graph in the sequence.) It follows that the sequence of paths, which, improving earlier estimates, we show has pebbling threshold $\Theta(2^{\sqrt{\log_2 n}} n/\sqrt{\log_2 n})$, does not have the greatest possible pebbling threshold.