Matchings in matroids over abelian groups (Q6570586)

Let \(G\) be an abelian group. A matroid \(M\) is over \(G\) if the ground set of \(M\) is a subset of \(G\). The authors of the paper under review study group matching problems in the matroid setting. Let \(M\) and \(N\) be two matroids over \(G\) of the same rank \(n > 0\), and let \(\mathcal{M} = \{a_1, \dots, a_n\}\) and \(\mathcal{N} = \{b_1, \dots, b_n\}\) be ordered bases of \(M\) and \(N\), respectively. We say the basis \(\mathcal{M}\) is matched to \(\mathcal{N}\) if \(a_i + b_i \ne E(M)\) for all \(i = 1, \dots, n\). We say the matroid \(M\) is matched to \(N\) if every basis of \(M\) is matched to some basis of \(N\). The group \(G\) has the matroid matching property if for every two matroids \(M\) and \(N\) over \(G\) with the same positive rank and \(0 \notin E(N)\), \(M\) is matched to \(N\). The authors prove that if \(G\) has the matroid matching property, then \(G\) is either torsion-free or cyclic of prime order. In the case when one considers only the sparse paving matroids, the authors are also able to give some partial results on the converse direction.