Fixing numbers for matroids (Q5964981)

A matroid automorphism is a bijection of the ground set which preserves the circuits and a set of elements \(S\) of a matroid is called a fixing set if the only isomorphism that fixes \(S\) pointwise is the identity. The fixing number of a matroid is defined as the minimum size of a fixing set. In this paper lower and upper bounds for fixing numbers for a general matroid in terms of the size and maximum orbit size (under the action of the matroid automorphism group) are given. It is also shown that the fixing numbers for the cycle matroid and the bicircular matroid associated with 3-connected graphs with at least 5 vertices are identical. If \(1\leq m<n\) then the fixing numbers for the cycle matroid and the bicircular matroid of \(K_{m,n}\) are equal to \(n-1\). If \(m=n\) these numbers are equal to \(n\) for \(n>2\) and to 3 for \(n=2\). Many of these results have interpretations through permutation groups.