Base partition for mixed families of finitary and cofinitary matroids

Consistency and independence results (03E35) Combinatorial aspects of matroids and geometric lattices (05B35) Combinatorial aspects of packing and covering (05B40) Infinite graphs (05C63) Matroids in convex geometry (realizations in the context of convex polytopes, convexity in combinatorial structures, etc.) (52B40)

Abstract: Let

m a t h c a l M = (M_{i} c o l o n i i n K)

be a finite or infinite family consisting of matroids on a common ground set

E

each of which may be finitary or cofinitary. We prove the following Cantor-Bernstein-type result: If there is a collection of bases, one for each

M_{i}

, which covers the set

E

, and also a collection of bases which is pairwise disjoint, then there is a collection of bases which partitions

E

. We also show that the failure of this Cantor-Bernstein-type statement for arbitrary matroid families is consistent relative to the axioms of set theory ZFC.

Review text

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.

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