The Catalan matroid

We show how the set of Dyck paths of length 2n naturally gives rise to a matroid, which we call the "Catalan matroid" C_n. We describe this matroid in detail; among several other results, we show that C_n is self-dual, it is representable over the rationals but not over finite fields F_q with q < n-1, and it has a nice Tutte polynomial. We then generalize our construction to obtain a family of matroids, which we call "shifted matroids". They arose independently and almost simultaneously in the work of Klivans, who showed that they are precisely the matroids whose independence complex is a shifted complex.Comment: 17 pages; submitted to the Journal of Combinatorial Theory - Series

Lattice path matroids: enumerative aspects and Tutte polynomials

Fix two lattice paths P and Q from (0,0) to (m,r) that use East and North steps with P never going above Q. We show that the lattice paths that go from (0,0) to (m,r) and that remain in the region bounded by P and Q can be identified with the bases of a particular type of transversal matroid, which we call a lattice path matroid. We consider a variety of enumerative aspects of these matroids and we study three important matroid invariants, namely the Tutte polynomial and, for special types of lattice path matroids, the characteristic polynomial and the beta invariant. In particular, we show that the Tutte polynomial is the generating function for two basic lattice path statistics and we show that certain sequences of lattice path matroids give rise to sequences of Tutte polynomials for which there are relatively simple generating functions. We show that Tutte polynomials of lattice path matroids can be computed in polynomial time. Also, we obtain a new result about lattice paths from an analysis of the beta invariant of certain lattice path matroids.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figure

Toric Ideals of Lattice Path Matroids and Polymatroids

We show that the toric ideal of a lattice path polymatroid is generated by quadrics corresponding to symmetric exchanges, and give a monomial order under which these quadrics form a Gr\"obner basis. We then obtain an analogous result for lattice path matroids.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure