6 research outputs found
Some inequalities for the Tutte polynomial
We prove that the Tutte polynomial of a coloopless paving matroid is convex
along the portions of the line segments x+y=p lying in the positive quadrant.
Every coloopless paving matroids is in the class of matroids which contain two
disjoint bases or whose ground set is the union of two bases of M*. For this
latter class we give a proof that T_M(a,a) <= max {T_M(2a,0), T_M(0,2a)} for a
>= 2. We conjecture that T_M(1,1) <= max {T_M(2,0), T_M(0,2)} for the same
class of matroids. We also prove this conjecture for some families of graphs
and matroids.Comment: 17 page
A Tutte polynomial inequality for lattice path matroids
Let be a matroid without loops or coloops and let be its Tutte
polynomial. In 1999 Merino and Welsh conjectured that holds for graphic matroids. Ten years later, Conde and
Merino proposed a multiplicative version of the conjecture which implies the
original one. In this paper we prove the multiplicative conjecture for the
family of lattice path matroids (generalizing earlier results on uniform and
Catalan matroids). In order to do this, we introduce and study particular
lattice path matroids, called snakes, used as building bricks to indeed
establish a strengthening of the multiplicative conjecture as well as a
complete characterization of the cases in which equality holds.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, improved exposition/minor correction