Antisymmetric flows in matroids (Q852703)

In this paper, a flow in an oriented matroid is defined to be an element of the abelian group generated under addition by the characteristic vectors of the circuits. A nowhere zero \(k\)-flow is one with entries in \(\{\pm 1, \pm 2, \dots, \pm(k-1)\}\). It is shown that if the oriented matroid \(\mathcal O\) has no coloop then it has a nowhere zero \((r+2)\)-flow. A nowhere zero flow is called antisymmetric if its entries do not include both \(m\) and \(-m\), for \(m \in \{1, \dots, k-1\}\). It is shown that any rank \(r\) oriented matroid has an antisymmetric \(3^{\lfloor {9 \over 2 }\rfloor r+1}\)-flow. A semiflow is an element of the group generated by the characteristic vectors of the circuits and cocircuits. It is shown that any oriented matroid has an antisymmetric nowhere zero 3-semiflow. The paper ends with a couple of open problems.