Cyclic Orderings and Cyclic Arboricity of Matroids

TL;DR

This paper establishes a general theorem on cyclic orderings of matroid elements, linking weight functions, independence, and cyclic permutations, and extends classical results on matroid and graph packings.

Contribution

It introduces a new equivalence relating weight-based conditions to cyclic orderings and independence in matroids, generalizing classical covering and packing theorems.

Findings

Equivalence between weight conditions and cyclic orderings in matroids.

Existence of cyclic permutations with bases as consecutive elements.

Circular arboricity equals fractional arboricity in matroids.

Abstract

We prove a general result concerning cyclic orderings of the elements of a matroid. For each matroid $M$, weight function $\omega:E(M)\rightarrow\mathbb{N}$, and positive integer $D$, the following are equivalent. (1) For all $A\subseteq E(M)$, we have $\sum_{a\in A}\omega(a)\le D\cdot r(A)$. (2) There is a map $\phi$ that assigns to each element $e$ of $E(M)$ a set $\phi(e)$ of $\omega(e)$ cyclically consecutive elements in the cycle $(1,2,...,D)$ so that each set $\{e|i\in\phi(e)\}$, for $i=1,...,D$, is independent. As a first corollary we obtain the following. For each matroid $M$ so that $|E(M)|$ and $r(M)$ are coprime, the following are equivalent. (1) For all non-empty $A\subseteq E(M)$, we have $|A|/r(A)\le|E(M)|/r(M)$. (2) There is a cyclic permutation of $E(M)$ in which all sets of $r(M)$ cyclically consecutive elements are bases of $M$. A second corollary is that the circular arboricity of a matroid is equal to its fractional arboricity. These results generalise classical results of Edmonds, Nash-Williams and Tutte on covering and packing matroids by bases and graphs by spanning trees.