Cycle Lemma, Parking Functions and Related Multigraphs

For positive integers a and b, an ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking function of length n is a sequence (p ₁, . . . , p _n ) of nonnegative integers whose weakly increasing order q ₁ ≤ . . . ≤ q _n satisfies the condition q _i  < a + (i ? 1)b. In this paper, we give a new proof of the enumeration formula for ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions by using of the cycle lemma for words, which leads to some enumerative results for the ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions with some restrictions such as symmetric property and periodic property. Based on a bijection between ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions and rooted forests, we enumerate combinatorially the ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions with identical initial terms and symmetric ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions with respect to the middle term. Moreover, we derive the critical group of a multigraph that is closely related to ${(a, \overline{b})}$ -parking functions.