An official website of the United States government
The augmented Bergman complex of a closure operator on a finite set interpolates between the order complex of proper flats and the independence complex of the operator. In 2020, Braden, Huh, Matherne, Proudfoot, and Wang showed that augmented Bergman complexes of matroids are always gallery-connected, and recently Bullock, Kelley, Reiner, Ren, Shemy, Shen, Sun, Tao, and Zhang strengthened gallery-connected to shellable by providing two classes of shelling orders: flag-to-basis shellings and basis-to-flag shellings. We show that augmented Bergman complexes of matroids are vertex decomposable, a stronger property than shellable. We also prove that the augmented Bergman complex of any closure operator is shellable if and only if the order complex of its lattice of flats (that is, its non-augmented Bergman complex) is shellable. As a consequence, an augmented Bergman complex is shellable if and only if it admits a flag-to-basis shelling. Perhaps surprisingly, the same does not hold for basis-to-flag shellings: we describe a closure operator whose augmented Bergman complex is shellable, but has no shelling order with bases appearing first.
more »
« less
Topology of Augmented Bergman Complexes
The augmented Bergman complex of a matroid is a simplicial complex introduced recently in work of Braden, Huh, Matherne, Proudfoot and Wang. It may be viewed as a hybrid of two well-studied pure shellable simplicial complexes associated to matroids: the independent set complex and Bergman complex. It is shown here that the augmented Bergman complex is also shellable, via two different families of shelling orders. Furthermore, comparing the description of its homotopy type induced from the two shellings re-interprets a known convolution formula counting bases of the matroid. The representation of the automorphism group of the matroid on the homology of the augmented Bergman complex turns out to have a surprisingly simple description. This last fact is generalized to closures beyond those coming from a matroid.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2053288
- PAR ID:
- 10328307
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1077-8926
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Megow, Nicole; Smith, Adam (Ed.)Given a matroid M = (E,I), and a total ordering over the elements E, a broken circuit is a circuit where the smallest element is removed and an NBC independent set is an independent set in I with no broken circuit. The set of NBC independent sets of any matroid M define a simplicial complex called the broken circuit complex which has been the subject of intense study in combinatorics. Recently, Adiprasito, Huh and Katz showed that the face of numbers of any broken circuit complex form a log-concave sequence, proving a long-standing conjecture of Rota. We study counting and optimization problems on NBC bases of a generic matroid. We find several fundamental differences with the independent set complex: for example, we show that it is NP-hard to find the max-weight NBC base of a matroid or that the convex hull of NBC bases of a matroid has edges of arbitrary large length. We also give evidence that the natural down-up walk on the space of NBC bases of a matroid may not mix rapidly by showing that for some family of matroids it is NP-hard to count the number of NBC bases after certain conditionings.more » « less
-
The theory of matroids or combinatorial geometries originated in linear algebra and graph theory, and has deep connections with many other areas, including field theory, matching theory, submodular optimization, Lie combinatorics, and total positivity. Matroids capture the combinatorial essence that these different settings share. In recent years, the (classical, polyhedral, algebraic, and tropical) geometric roots of the field have grown much deeper, bearing new fruits. We survey some recent successes, stemming from three geometric models of a matroid: the matroid polytope, the Bergman fan, and the conormal fan.more » « less
-
Leclerc and Zelevinsky, motivated by the study of quasi-commuting quantum flag minors, introduced the notions of strongly separated and weakly separated collections. These notions are closely related to the theory of cluster algebras, to the combinatorics of the double Bruhat cells, and to the totally positive Grassmannian. A key feature, called the purity phenomenon, is that every maximal by inclusion strongly (resp., weakly) separated collection of subsets in $[n]$ has the same cardinality. In this paper, we extend these notions and define $$\mathcal{M}$$-separated collections for any oriented matroid $$\mathcal{M}$$. We show that maximal by size $$\mathcal{M}$$-separated collections are in bijection with fine zonotopal tilings (if $$\mathcal{M}$$ is a realizable oriented matroid), or with one-element liftings of $$\mathcal{M}$$ in general position (for an arbitrary oriented matroid). We introduce the class of pure oriented matroids for which the purity phenomenon holds: an oriented matroid $$\mathcal{M}$$ is pure if $$\mathcal{M}$$-separated collections form a pure simplicial complex, i.e., any maximal by inclusion $$\mathcal{M}$$-separated collection is also maximal by size. We pay closer attention to several special classes of oriented matroids: oriented matroids of rank $$3$$, graphical oriented matroids, and uniform oriented matroids. We classify pure oriented matroids in these cases. An oriented matroid of rank $$3$$ is pure if and only if it is a positroid (up to reorienting and relabeling its ground set). A graphical oriented matroid is pure if and only if its underlying graph is an outerplanar graph, that is, a subgraph of a triangulation of an $$n$$-gon. We give a simple conjectural characterization of pure oriented matroids by forbidden minors and prove it for the above classes of matroids (rank $$3$$, graphical, uniform).more » « less
-
We prove that the maximum likelihood degree of a matroid M equals its beta invariant β(M). For an element e of M that is neither a loop nor a coloop, this is defined to be the degree of the intersection of the Bergman fan of (M,e) and the inverted Bergman fan of N = (M/e)^⊥. Equivalently, for a generic vector w ∈ R^E−e, this is the number of ways to find weights (0, x) on M and y on N with x + y = w such that on each circuit of M (resp. N), the minimum x-weight (resp. y-weight) occurs at least twice.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.37236/10739
