English

On the coefficients of interior and exterior polynomials of polymatroids

Combinatorics 2025-09-29 v1

Abstract

The Tutte polynomial is an important invariant of graphs and matroids. Chen and Guo \emph{[Adv. in Appl. Math. 166 (2025) 102868.]} proved that for a (k+1)(k+1)-edge connected graph GG and for any ii with 0i<3(k+1)20\leq i <\frac{3(k+1)}{2}, [ygi]TG(1,y)=(V(G)+i2i)j=0i(V(G)+i2jij)SCj(G),[y^{g-i}]T_{G}(1,y)=\binom{|V(G)|+i-2}{i}-\sum_{j=0}^{i}\binom{|V(G)|+i-2-j}{i-j}|\mathcal{SC}_{j}(G)|, where g=E(G)V(G)+1g=|E(G)|-|V(G)|+1, SCj(G)\mathcal{SC}_{j}(G) is the set of all minimal edge cuts with jj edges, TG(x,y)T_{G}(x,y) is the Tutte polynomial of the graph GG, and [ygi]TG(1,y)[y^{g-i}]T_{G}(1,y) denotes the coefficient of ygiy^{g-i} in the polynomial TG(1,y)T_{G}(1,y). Recently, Ma, Guan and Jin \emph{[arXiv.2503.06095, 2025.]} generalized this result from graphs to matroids and obtained the dual result on coefficients of TM(x,1)T_M(x,1) of matroids MM at the same time. In 2013, as a generalization of TG(x,1)T_{G}(x,1) and TG(1,y)T_{G}(1,y) of graphs GG to hypergraphs, K\'{a}lm\'{a}n \emph{[Adv. Math. 244 (2013) 823-873.]} introduced interior and exterior polynomials for connected hypergraphs. Chen and Guo posed a problem that can one generalize these results of graphs to interior and exterior polynomials of hypergraphs? In this paper, we solve it in the affirmative by obtaining results for more general polymatroids, which include the case of hypergraphs and also generalize the results of matroids due to Ma, Guan and Jin. As an application, the sequence consisting of these coefficients on polymatroids is proven to be unimodal, while the unimodality of the whole coefficients of matroids was obtained in 2018 by Adiprasito, Huh and Katz using Hodge theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.22142,
  title  = {On the coefficients of interior and exterior polynomials of polymatroids},
  author = {Xiaxia Guan and Xian'an Jin and Tianlong Ma and Weihua Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.22142},
  year   = {2025}
}