Convex, acyclic, and free sets of an oriented matroid (Q1596358)

The authors unify (and generalize) in this paper a number of known results in the topology of: 1. the semilattice of convex sets, 2. the simplicial complex of acyclic sets, 3. the simplicial complex of free sets of an oriented matroid. Firstly, it is shown these objects are contractible, except for totally cyclic oriented matroids, where they have the homotopy type of a sphere with dimension the rank of the matroid decreased by one. Their techniques reside mainly on the Quillen fibre lemma and in the Folkman-Lawrence representation theorem and in a recent result by \textit{Xun Dong} (``Alexander duality for projections of polytopes'', to appear in Topology). Secondly, the homotopy types of intervals and principal filters in 1., and links of faces in 2. and 3. are studied, and proved again to be either the homotopy type of a sphere or the type of a point.