English

Generalized spikes with circuits and cocircuits of different cardinalities

Combinatorics 2025-12-18 v1

Abstract

We consider matroids with the property that every subset of the ground set of size ss is contained in a 2s2s-element circuit and every subset of size tt is contained in a 2t2t-element cocircuit. We say that such a matroid has the \emph{(s,2s,t,2t)(s,2s,t,2t)-property}. A matroid is an \emph{(s,t)(s,t)-spike} if there is a partition of the ground set into pairs such that the union of any ss pairs is a circuit and the union of any tt pairs is a cocircuit. Our main result is that all sufficiently large matroids with the (s,2s,t,2t)(s,2s,t,2t)-property are (s,t)(s,t)-spikes, generalizing a 2019 result that proved the case where s=ts=t. We also present some properties of (s,t)(s,t)-spikes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.14524,
  title  = {Generalized spikes with circuits and cocircuits of different cardinalities},
  author = {Nick Brettell and Kevin Grace},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.14524},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1804.06959