A deletion-contraction formula and monotonicity properties for the polymatroid Tutte polynomial

TL;DR

This paper extends the Tutte polynomial to polymatroids, providing a deletion-contraction formula, proving monotonicity properties for certain polynomials, and characterizing hypergraphs with maximal polynomial coefficients.

Contribution

It introduces a deletion-contraction formula for the polymatroid Tutte polynomial and establishes new monotonicity properties for interior and exterior polynomials.

Findings

Deletion-contraction formula for $\

Monotonicity properties for interior and exterior polynomials, but not for the Tutte polynomial itself.

Characterization of hypergraphs with maximal coefficients in the exterior polynomial.

Abstract

The Tutte polynomial is a crucial invariant of matroids. The polymatroid Tutte polynomial $\mathscr{T}_{P}(x,y)$, introduced by Bernardi et al., is an extension of the classical Tutte polynomial from matroids to polymatroids $P$. In this paper, we first obtain a deletion-contraction formula for $\mathscr{T}_{P}(x,y)$. Then we prove two natural monotonicity properties, for containment and for minors of the interior polynomial $x^{n}\mathscr{T}_{P}(x^{-1},1)$ and the exterior polynomial $y^{n}\mathscr{T}_{P}(1,y^{-1})$, for polymatroids $P$ over $[n]$. We show by a counter-example that these monotonicity properties do not extend to $\mathscr{T}_{P}(x,y)$. Using deletion-contraction, we obtain formulas for the coefficients of terms of degree $n-1$ in $\mathscr{T}_{P}(x,y)$. Finally, for all $k\geq 0$, we characterize hypergraphs $\mathcal{H}=(V,E)$ so that the coefficient of $y^{k}$ in the exterior polynomial of the associated polymatroid $P_{\mathcal{H}}$ attains its maximal value $\binom{|V|+k-2}{k}$.