A positivity property of the dimer entropy of graphs

The entropy of a monomer–dimer system on an infinite regular bipartite lattice can be written as a mean-field part plus a series expansion in the dimer density. In a previous paper it has been conjectured that all coefficients of this series are positive. Analogously on a connected regular graph with v vertices, the “entropy” of the graph lnN(i)/v, where N(i) is the number of ways of setting down i dimers on the graph, can be written as a part depending only on the number of the dimer configurations over the completed graph plus a Newton series in the dimer density on the graph. In this paper, we investigate for which connected regular graphs all the coefficients of the Newton series are positive (for short, these graphs will be called positive). In the class of connected regular bipartite graphs, up to v=20, the only non positive graphs have vertices of degree 3. From v=14 to v=30, the frequency of the positivity violations in the 3-regular graphs decreases with increasing v. In the case of connected 4-regular bipartite graphs, the first violations occur in two out of the 2806490 graphs with v=22. We conjecture that for each degree r the frequency of the violations, in the class of the r-regular bipartite graphs, goes to zero as v tends to infinity.