Base partition for mixed families of finitary and cofinitary matroids (Q2036617)

As motivation the authors claim to have recently proved that if an (infinite) graph admits a packing (trees are disjoint) and a covering (union is the entire edge set) both consisting of \(\lambda\) many spanning trees, where \(\lambda\) is some infinite cardinal, then the graph also admits a decomposition into \(\lambda \) many spanning trees. For a finite or infinite collection of matroids, all on the same ground set \(E\), \(\mathcal{M} =(M_i, i \in K)\), where each of the \(M_i\) is either finitary (i.e. all cycles are finite) or co-finitary, the authors prove that if there is a collection of bases, one for each \(M_i\), which covers the set \(E\), and a collection of bases, again one for each \(M_i \), which are pairwise disjoint, then there is a collection of bases which partitions \(E\). To point out that this result does not hold for arbitrary matroids the authors show that, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, there exists a countable matroid \(M\) such that the family consisting of two copies of \(M\) admits a base covering and a base packing, but no base partitioning. A short introduction to infinite matroids makes the paper self contained and readable.