The Sandpile Group of a Tree

Abstract

A wired tree is a graph obtained from a tree by collapsing the leaves to a single vertex. We describe a pair of short exact sequences relating the sandpile group of a wired tree to the sandpile groups of its principal subtrees. In the case of a regular tree these sequences split, enabling us to compute the full decomposition of the sandpile group as a product of cyclic groups. This resolves in the affirmative a conjecture of E. Toumpakari concerning the ranks of the Sylow p-subgroups.