166 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
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
Fixing numbers for matroids
Motivated by work in graph theory, we define the fixing number for a matroid.
We give upper and lower bounds for fixing numbers for a general matroid in
terms of the size and maximum orbit size (under the action of the matroid
automorphism group). We prove the fixing numbers for the cycle matroid and
bicircular matroid associated with 3-connected graphs are identical. Many of
these results have interpretations through permutation groups, and we make this
connection explicit.Comment: This is a major revision of a previous versio
Internally 4-connected binary matroids with cyclically sequential orderings
We characterize all internally 4-connected binary matroids M with the property that the ground set of M can be ordered (e0,…,en−1) in such a way that {ei,…,ei+t} is 4-separating for all 0≤i,t≤n−1 (all subscripts are read modulo n). We prove that in this case either n≤7 or, up to duality, M is isomorphic to the polygon matroid of a cubic or quartic planar ladder, the polygon matroid of a cubic or quartic Möbius ladder, a particular single-element extension of a wheel, or a particular single-element extension of the bond matroid of a cubic ladder
- …