Symplectic spaces and ear-decomposition of matroids

Abstract

Matroids admitting an odd ear-decomposition can be viewed as natural generalizations of factor-critical graphs. We prove that a matroid representable over a field of characteristic 2 admits an odd ear-decomposition if and only if it can be represented by some space on which the induced scalar product is a non-degenerate symplectic form. We also show that, for a matroid representable over a field of characteristic 2, the independent sets whose contraction admits an odd ear-decomposition form the family of feasible sets of a representable Δ-matroid. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.