Squareness for the monopole-dimer model

Abstract

The monopole-dimer model introduced recently is an exactly solvable signed generalisation of the dimer model. We show that the partition function of the monopole-dimer model on a graph invariant under a fixed-point free involution is a perfect square. We give a combinatorial interpretation of the square root of the partition function for such graphs in terms of a monopole-dimer model on a new kind of graph with two types of edges which we call a dicot. The partition function of the latter can be written as a determinant, this time of a complex adjacency matrix. This formulation generalises Wu’s assignment of imaginary orientation for the grid graph to planar dicots. As an application, we compute the partition function for a family of non-planar dicots with positive weights.