Locality of Connective Constants, Ii. Cayley Graphs

The connective constant μ(G) of an infinite transitive graph G is the exponential growth rate of the number of self-avoiding walks from a given origin. In earlier work of Grimmett and Li, a locality theorem was proved for connective constants, namely, that the connective constants of two graphs are close in value whenever the graphs agree on a large ball around the origin. A condition of the theorem was that the graphs support so-called ‘graph height functions’. When the graphs are Cayley graphs of infinite, finitely generated groups, there is a special type of graph height function termed here a ‘group height function’. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a group height function is presented, and may be applied in the context of the bridge constant, and of the locality of connective constants for Cayley graphs. Locality may thereby be established for a variety of infinite groups including those with strictly positive deficiency. It is proved that a large class of transitive graphs (and hence Cayley graphs) support graph height functions that are in addition harmonic on the graph. This extends an earlier constructive proof of Grimmett and Li, but subject to an additional condition of unimodularity which is benign in the context of Cayley graphs. It implies the existence of graph height functions for finitely generated solvable groups. Group height functions, as well as the graph height functions of the previous paragraph, are non-constant harmonic functions with linear growth and an additional property of having periodic differences. The existence of such functions on Cayley graphs is a topic of interest beyond their applications in the theory of self-avoiding walks.