When do two planted graphs have the same cotransversal matroid?

Cotransversal matroids are a family of matroids that arise from planted graphs. We prove that two planted graphs give the same cotransversal matroid if and only if they can be obtained from each other by a series of local moves.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures; expository change

Short rainbow cycles in graphs and matroids

Let $G$ be a simple $n$-vertex graph and $c$ be a colouring of $E(G)$ with $n$ colours, where each colour class has size at least $2$. We prove that $(G,c)$ contains a rainbow cycle of length at most $\lceil \frac{n}{2} \rceil$, which is best possible. Our result settles a special case of a strengthening of the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture, due to Aharoni. We also show that the matroid generalization of our main result also holds for cographic matroids, but fails for binary matroids.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

Cubic Time Recognition of Cocircuit Graphs of Uniform Oriented Matroids

We present an algorithm which takes a graph as input and decides in cubic time if the graph is the cocircuit graph of a uniform oriented matroid. In the affirmative case the algorithm returns the set of signed cocircuits of the oriented matroid. This improves an algorithm proposed by Babson, Finschi and Fukuda. Moreover we strengthen a result of Montellano-Ballesteros and Strausz about crabbed connectivity of cocircuit graphs of uniform oriented matroids.Comment: 9 page