A combinatorial approach to counting primitive periodic and primitive pseudo orbits on circulant graphs

We count the numbers of primitive periodic orbits on families of 4-regular directed circulant graphs with $n$ vertices. The relevant counting techniques are then extended to count the numbers of primitive pseudo orbits (sets of distinct primitive periodic orbits) up to length $n$ that lack self-intersections, or that never intersect at more than a single vertex at a time repeated exactly twice for each self-intersection (2-encounters of length zero), for two particular families of graphs. We then regard these two families of graphs as families of quantum graphs and use the counting results to compute the variance of the coefficients of the quantum graphs characteristic polynomial.