Fire retainment on Cayley graphs

Gideon Amir, Rangel Baldasso, Maria Gerasimova, Gady Kozma

Published 2021-12-16, updated 2022-10-07Version 2

We study the fire-retaining problem on groups, a quasi-isometry invariant introduced by Mart\'inez-Pedroza and Prytula [8], related to the firefighter problem. We prove that any Cayley graph with degree-$d$ polynomial growth does not satisfy $\{f(n)\}$-retainment, for any $f(n) = o(n^{d-2})$, matching the upper bound given for the firefighter problem for these graphs. In the exponential growth regime we prove general lower bounds for direct products and wreath products. These bounds are tight, and show that for exponential-growth groups a wide variety of behaviors is possible. In particular, we construct, for any $d\geq 1$, groups that satisfy $\{n^{d}\}$-retainment but not $o(n^d)$-retainment, as well as groups that do not satisfy sub-exponential retainment.