English

Short Rainbow Circuits in Regular Matroids

Combinatorics 2026-01-27 v1

Abstract

DeVos et al conjectured that if MM is a simple, regular matroid and cc is a colouring of the elements of MM with r(M)+1r(M)+1 colours, where each colour class has at least two elements, then MM contains a rainbow circuit of size at most r(M)+12.\lceil \frac {r(M)+1}2 \rceil. We prove this conjecture by showing that for all such regular matroids there are four rainbow circuits Ci, i=1,2,3,4C_i,\ i = 1,2,3,4 for which iCi2r(M)+4\sum_i |C_i| \le 2r(M) +4 and for which no element of MM belongs to more than two of the circuits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.17624,
  title  = {Short Rainbow Circuits in Regular Matroids},
  author = {Sean McGuinness},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17624},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:18:49.582Z