Fixing numbers for matroids

Abstract: Motivated by work in graph theory, we define the fixing number for a matroid. We give upper and lower 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). We prove the fixing numbers for the cycle matroid and bicircular matroid associated with 3-connected graphs are identical. Many of these results have interpretations through permutation groups, and we make this connection explicit.

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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.

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