The Salesman's Improved Tours for Fundamental Classes

Finding the exact integrality gap $\alpha$ for the LP relaxation of the metric Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been an open problem for over thirty years, with little progress made. It is known that $4/3 \leq \alpha \leq 3/2$, and a famous conjecture states $\alpha = 4/3$. For this problem, essentially two "fundamental" classes of instances have been proposed. This fundamental property means that in order to show that the integrality gap is at most $\rho$ for all instances of metric TSP, it is sufficient to show it only for the instances in the fundamental class. However, despite the importance and the simplicity of such classes, no apparent effort has been deployed for improving the integrality gap bounds for them. In this paper we take a natural first step in this endeavour, and consider the $1/2$-integer points of one such class. We successfully improve the upper bound for the integrality gap from $3/2$ to $10/7$ for a superclass of these points, as well as prove a lower bound of $4/3$ for the superclass. Our methods involve innovative applications of tools from combinatorial optimization which have the potential to be more broadly applied

General duality for abelian-group-valued statistical-mechanics models

We introduce a general class of statistical-mechanics models, taking values in an abelian group, which includes examples of both spin and gauge models, both ordered and disordered. The model is described by a set of ``variables'' and a set of ``interactions''. A Gibbs factor is associated to each variable and to each interaction. We introduce a duality transformation for systems in this class. The duality exchanges the abelian group with its dual, the Gibbs factors with their Fourier transforms, and the interactions with the variables. High (low) couplings in the interaction terms are mapped into low (high) couplings in the one-body terms. The idea is that our class of systems extends the one for which the classical procedure 'a la Kramers and Wannier holds, up to include randomness into the pattern of interaction. We introduce and study some physical examples: a random Gaussian Model, a random Potts-like model, and a random variant of discrete scalar QED. We shortly describe the consequence of duality for each example.Comment: 26 pages, 2 Postscript figure

Excluding Kuratowski graphs and their duals from binary matroids

We consider some applications of our characterisation of the internally 4-connected binary matroids with no M(K3,3)-minor. We characterise the internally 4-connected binary matroids with no minor in some subset of {M(K3,3),M*(K3,3),M(K5),M*(K5)} that contains either M(K3,3) or M*(K3,3). We also describe a practical algorithm for testing whether a binary matroid has a minor in the subset. In addition we characterise the growth-rate of binary matroids with no M(K3,3)-minor, and we show that a binary matroid with no M(K3,3)-minor has critical exponent over GF(2) at most equal to four.Comment: Some small change

Quaternionic Geometry of Matroids

Building on a recent joint paper with Sturmfels, here we argue that the combinatorics of matroids is intimately related to the geometry and topology of toric hyperkaehler varieties. We show that just like toric varieties occupy a central role in Stanley's proof for the necessity of McMullen's conjecture (or g-inequalities) about the classification of face vectors of simplicial polytopes, the topology of toric hyperkaehler varieties leads to new restrictions on face vectors of matroid complexes. Namely in this paper we give two proofs that the injectivity part of the Hard Lefschetz theorem survives for toric hyperkaehler varieties. We explain how this implies the g-inequalities for rationally representable matroids. We show how the geometrical intuition in the first proof, coupled with results of Chari, leads to a proof of the g-inequalities for general matroid complexes, which is a recent result of Swartz. The geometrical idea in the second proof will show that a pure O-sequence should satisfy the g-inequalities, thus showing that our result is in fact a consequence of a long-standing conjecture of Stanley.Comment: 11 page