Chip-Firing on Infinite $k$-ary Trees

Abstract

We use an infinite $k$-ary tree with a self-loop at the root as our underlying graph. We consider a chip-firing process starting with $N$ chips at the root. We describe the stable configurations. We calculate the number of fires for each vertex and the total number of fires. We study a sequence of the number of root fires for a given $k$ as a function of $N$ and study its properties. We do the same for the total number of fires.