COMs: Complexes of Oriented Matroids

In his seminal 1983 paper, Jim Lawrence introduced lopsided sets and featured them as asymmetric counterparts of oriented matroids, both sharing the key property of strong elimination. Moreover, symmetry of faces holds in both structures as well as in the so-called affine oriented matroids. These two fundamental properties (formulated for covectors) together lead to the natural notion of "conditional oriented matroid" (abbreviated COM). These novel structures can be characterized in terms of three cocircuits axioms, generalizing the familiar characterization for oriented matroids. We describe a binary composition scheme by which every COM can successively be erected as a certain complex of oriented matroids, in essentially the same way as a lopsided set can be glued together from its maximal hypercube faces. A realizable COM is represented by a hyperplane arrangement restricted to an open convex set. Among these are the examples formed by linear extensions of ordered sets, generalizing the oriented matroids corresponding to the permutohedra. Relaxing realizability to local realizability, we capture a wider class of combinatorial objects: we show that non-positively curved Coxeter zonotopal complexes give rise to locally realizable COMs.Comment: 40 pages, 6 figures, (improved exposition

Oriented Matroids -- Combinatorial Structures Underlying Loop Quantum Gravity

We analyze combinatorial structures which play a central role in determining spectral properties of the volume operator in loop quantum gravity (LQG). These structures encode geometrical information of the embedding of arbitrary valence vertices of a graph in 3-dimensional Riemannian space, and can be represented by sign strings containing relative orientations of embedded edges. We demonstrate that these signature factors are a special representation of the general mathematical concept of an oriented matroid. Moreover, we show that oriented matroids can also be used to describe the topology (connectedness) of directed graphs. Hence the mathematical methods developed for oriented matroids can be applied to the difficult combinatorics of embedded graphs underlying the construction of LQG. As a first application we revisit the analysis of [4-5], and find that enumeration of all possible sign configurations used there is equivalent to enumerating all realizable oriented matroids of rank 3, and thus can be greatly simplified. We find that for 7-valent vertices having no coplanar triples of edge tangents, the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the volume spectrum does not grow as one increases the maximum spin \jmax at the vertex, for any orientation of the edge tangents. This indicates that, in contrast to the area operator, considering large \jmax does not necessarily imply large volume eigenvalues. In addition we give an outlook to possible starting points for rewriting the combinatorics of LQG in terms of oriented matroids.Comment: 43 pages, 26 figures, LaTeX. Version published in CQG. Typos corrected, presentation slightly extende

Infinite trees of matroids

We generalise the construction of infinite matroids from trees of matroids to allow the matroids at the nodes, as well as the field over which they are represented, to be infinite