On density-critical matroids (Q2185225)

For a matroid $M$ having $m$ rank-one flats, the density $d(M)$ is $m/r(M)$ for all $m>0$. A matroid is density-critical if every proper minors of non-zero rank has lower density. It is shown that there are exactly ten minor-minimal simple obstructions to a matroid being able to be covered by two independent sets. These ten matroids are precisely the density critical matroids $M$ such that $d(M) > 2$ but $d(N) \leq 2$ for all proper minors $N$ of $M$. All density-critical matroids with $d(M)<2$ are series-parallel networks. The authors have found all density-critical matroids of density at most 9/4.