Esperet et al.'s flow reconfiguration equivalence conjecture

From papers

Let GG be a graph and kk a positive integer. A kk-flow is a nowhere-zero integer flow with 0<f(e)<k0<|f(e)|<k on every edge, and an AA-flow is a nowhere-zero flow with values in an abelian group AA. Let F(G,k)\mathcal{F}(G,k) and F(G,Zk)\mathcal{F}(G,\mathbb{Z}_k) be the reconfiguration graphs whose vertices are the corresponding flows and whose edges represent flow-adjacency.

Esperet et al.'s flow reconfiguration conjecture. For each graph GG and each positive integer kk,

F(G,k) is connected if and only if F(G,Zk) is connected.\mathcal{F}(G,k)\text{ is connected if and only if }\mathcal{F}(G,\mathbb{Z}_k)\text{ is connected}.

One direction is easy, since reducing flow values modulo kk maps walks to walks. The reverse direction remains open; the source also gives examples showing that reconfiguration can distinguish nonisomorphic groups of the same order.

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Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Daniel W. Cranston, Jiaao Li, Bo Su, Zhouningxin Wang and Ningyan Xu, “Reconfiguration of Nowhere-zero Flows”, arXiv:2606.24685 (2026).

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