English

Coefficients of univariate Tutte polynomials with one variable fixed

Combinatorics 2026-05-26 v2

Abstract

It is well known that the 2-variable Tutte polynomials contain chromatic polynomial and flow polynomial of graphs, i.e. the cases of y=0y=0 and x=0x=0. In 2013, K\'{a}lm\'{a}n introduced the interior and exterior polynomials which generalized the cases of y=1y=1 and x=1x=1 of Tutte polynomials of graphs to hypergraphs, and further polymatroids. There have been some results on coefficients of these polynomials, which motivate us to study uniformly the coefficients of TM(x,t)T_M(x,t) and TM(t,y)T_M(t,y), where MM is a matroid and tt is a fixed real number. In this paper, we introduce two mutually dual parameters fk(M)f_k(M) and gk(M)g_k(M) (g1(M)g_1(M) is the grith of MM) for any nonnegative integer kk, obtaining: (1) Formulas for coefficients of the higher-degree terms (related to g2(M)g_2(M) and f2(M)f_2(M), respectively) of TM(x,t)T_M(x,t) and TM(t,y)T_M(t,y) in terms of circuits and hyperplanes of MM; (2) when 0t10\leq t \leq 1, coefficients of the more higher-degree terms (related to g1(M)g_1(M) and f1(M)f_1(M), respectively) of TM(x,t)T_M(x,t) and TM(t,y)T_M(t,y) are further simplified and characterized; (3) As applications, some known results in the cases t=0t=0 and t=1t=1 are derived and generalized, and the unimodality of these coefficients in (1) are proved when t1t\leq 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.06095,
  title  = {Coefficients of univariate Tutte polynomials with one variable fixed},
  author = {Tianlong Ma and Xiaxia Guan and Xian'an Jin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06095},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:11:55.708Z