221 research outputs found
Isotropical Linear Spaces and Valuated Delta-Matroids
The spinor variety is cut out by the quadratic Wick relations among the
principal Pfaffians of an n x n skew-symmetric matrix. Its points correspond to
n-dimensional isotropic subspaces of a 2n-dimensional vector space. In this
paper we tropicalize this picture, and we develop a combinatorial theory of
tropical Wick vectors and tropical linear spaces that are tropically isotropic.
We characterize tropical Wick vectors in terms of subdivisions of Delta-matroid
polytopes, and we examine to what extent the Wick relations form a tropical
basis. Our theory generalizes several results for tropical linear spaces and
valuated matroids to the class of Coxeter matroids of type D
On the Number of Circuit-cocircuit Reversal Classes of an Oriented Matroid
The first author introduced the circuit-cocircuit reversal system of an
oriented matroid, and showed that when the underlying matroid is regular, the
cardinalities of such system and its variations are equal to special
evaluations of the Tutte polynomial (e.g., the total number of
circuit-cocircuit reversal classes equals , the number of bases of
the matroid). By relating these classes to activity classes studied by the
first author and Las Vergnas, we give an alternative proof of the above results
and a proof of the converse statements that these equalities fail whenever the
underlying matroid is not regular. Hence we extend the above results to an
equivalence of matroidal properties, thereby giving a new characterization of
regular matroids.Comment: 7 pages. v2: simplified proof, with new statements concerning other
special evaluations of the Tutte polynomia
Constructing internally 4-connected binary matroids
This is the post-print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2013 ElsevierIn an earlier paper, we proved that an internally 4-connected binary matroid with at least seven elements contains an internally 4-connected proper minor that is at most six elements smaller. We refine this result, by giving detailed descriptions of the operations required to produce the internally 4-connected minor. Each of these operations is top-down, in that it produces a smaller minor from the original. We also describe each as a bottom-up operation, constructing a larger matroid from the original, and we give necessary and su fficient conditions for each of these bottom-up moves to produce an internally 4-connected binary matroid. From this, we derive a constructive method for generating all internally 4-connected binary matroids.This study is supported by NSF IRFP Grant 0967050, the Marsden Fund, and the National Security Agency
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