In this paper, we introduce morphisms for matroids with coefficients (in the sense of Baker and Bowler) and quiver matroids. We investigate their basic properties, such as functoriality, duality, minors and cryptomorphic characterizations in terms of vectors, circuits and bases (a.k.a. Grassmann-Plücker functions). We generalize quiver matroids to quiver matroid bundles and construct their moduli space, which is an $\mathbb{F}_1$-analogue of a complex quiver Grassmannian. Eventually we introduce a suitable interpretation of $\mathbb{F}_1$-points for these moduli spaces, so that in 'nice' cases their number is equal to the Euler characteristic of the associated complex quiver Grassmannian.
Postnikov constructed a cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. The poset of cells can be described (in particular) via Grassmann necklaces. We study certain quiver Grassmannians for the cyclic quiver admitting a cellular decomposition, whose cells are naturally labeled by Grassmann necklaces. We show that the posets of cells coincide with the reversed cell posets of the cellular decomposition of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. We investigate algebro-geometric and combinatorial properties of these quiver Grassmannians. In particular, we describe the irreducible …
The goal of this paper is to clarify the connection between certain structures from the theory of totally nonnegative Grassmannians, quiver Grassmannians for cyclic quivers and the theory of local models of Shimura varieties. More precisely, we generalize the construction from our previous paper relating the combinatorics and geometry of quiver Grassmanians to that of the totally nonnegative Grassmannians. The varieties we are interested in serve as realizations of local models of Shimura varieties. We exploit quiver representation techniques to study the quiver Grassmannians of interest and, …
Quiver Grassmannians are varieties parametrizing subrepresentations of a quiver representation. It is observed that certain quiver Grassmannians for type A quivers are isomorphic to the degenerate flag varieties investigated earlier by the second named author. This leads to the consideration of a class of Grassmannians of subrepresentations of the direct sum of a projective and an injective representation of a Dynkin quiver. It is proven that these are (typically singular) irreducible normal local complete intersection varieties, which admit a group action with finitely many orbits, and a cell…
We present a review on the recently discovered link between the Lie theory,the theory of quiver Grassmannians, and various degenerations of flag varieties. Our starting point is the induced Poincaré--Birkhoff--Witt filtration on the highest weight representations and the corresponding PBW degenerate flag varieties.
Caldero and Zelevinsky studied the geometry of quiver Grassmannians for the Kronecker quiver and computed their Euler characteristics by examining natural stratification of quiver Grassmannians. We consider generalized Kronecker quivers and compute virtual Poincare polynomials of certain varieties which are the images under projections from strata of quiver Grassmannians to ordinary Grassmannians. In contrast to the Kronecker quiver case, these polynomials do not necessarily have positive coefficients. The key ingredient is the explicit formula for noncommutative cluster variables given by Ral…
We provide a technique to compute the Euler characteristic of a class of projective varieties called quiver Grassmannians. This technique applies to quiver Grassmannians associated with "orientable string modules". As an application we explicitly compute the Euler characteristic of quiver Grassmannians associated with indecomposable preprojective, preinjective and regular homogeneous representations of an affine quiver of type $\tilde{A}_{p,1}$. For $p=1$, this approach provides another proof of a result due to P. Caldero and A. Zelevinsky in \cite{CZ}.
In this article, we use the relationship between cluster scattering diagrams and stability scattering diagrams to relate quiver representations with these diagrams. With a notion of positive crossing of a path $γ$, we show that if $γ$ has positive crossing in the scattering diagram, then it goes in the opposite direction of the Auslander-Reiten quiver of $Q$. We then give the Hall algebra theta functions which recover the cluster character formula by the Euler characteristic map. At last, we define the Hall algebra broken lines and then are able to give the stratification of the quiver Grassma…
In previous work we equipped quiver Grassmannians for nilpotent representations of the equioriented cycle with an action of an algebraic torus. We show here that the equivariant cohomology ring is acted upon by a product of symmetric groups and we investigate this permutation action via GKM techniques. In the case of (type A) flag varieties, or Schubert varieties therein, we recover Tymoczko's results on permutation representations.
In analogy with the origin of the additive structure of $K$-theory, we construct an $E_\infty$ structure on the matroid Grassmannian (the space of oriented matroids) for which the underlying binary operation is the direct sum of matroids. The proof involves lifting the polyhedral fan structure of the Dressian to a polyhedral model for the matroid Grassmannian, and introducing a novel $E_\infty$ operad made from the space of infinite subsets of $\mathbb{N}$.
Matroids are ubiquitous in modern combinatorics. As discovered by Gelfand, Goresky, MacPherson and Serganova there is a beautiful connection between matroid theory and the geometry of Grassmannians: realizable matroids correspond to torus orbits in Grassmannians. Further, as observed by Fink and Speyer general matroids correspond to classes in the $K$-theory of Grassmannians. This yields in particular a geometric description of the Tutte polynomial. In this review we describe all these constructions in detail, and moreover we generalise some of them to polymatroids. More precisely, we study th…
In a recent paper Baker and Bowler introduced matroids over hyperfields, offering a common generalization of matroids, oriented matroids, and linear subspaces of based vector spaces. This paper introduces the notion of a topological hyperfield and explores the generalization of Grassmannians and realization spaces to this context, particularly in relating the (hyper)fields R and C to hyperfields arising in matroid theory and in tropical geometry.
A basis shape locus takes as input data a zero/nonzero pattern in an $n \times k$ matrix, which is equivalent to a presentation of a transversal matroid. The locus is defined as the set of points in the Grassmannian of $k$ planes in $\mathbb{R}^n$ which are the row space of a matrix with the prescribed zero/nonzero pattern. We show that this locus depends only on the transversal matroid, not on the specific presentation. When a transversal matroid is a positroid, the closure of its basis shape locus is the associated positroid variety. We give a sufficient, and conjecturally necessary, conditi…
It is known that for the natural algebraic torus actions on the Grassmannians, the closures of torus orbits are toric varieties, and that these toric varieties are smooth if and only if the corresponding matroid polytopes are simple. We prove that simple matroid polytopes are products of simplices and smooth torus orbit closures in the Grassmannians are products of complex projective spaces. Moreover, it turns out that the smooth torus orbit closures are uniquely determined by the corresponding simple matroid polytopes.
Matroid bundles, introduced by MacPherson, are combinatorial analogues of real vector bundles. This paper sets up the foundations of matroid bundles, and defines a natural transformation from isomorphism classes of real vector bundles to isomorphism classes of matroid bundles, as well as a transformation from matroid bundles to spherical quasifibrations. The poset of oriented matroids of a fixed rank classifies matroid bundles, and the above transformations give a splitting from topology to combinatorics back to topology. This shows the mod 2 cohomology of the poset of rank k oriented matroids…
Matroid varieties are the closures in the Grassmannian of sets of points defined by specifying which Plücker coordinates vanish and which don't. In general these varieties are very ill-behaved, but in many cases one can estimate their codimension by keeping careful track of the conditions imposed by the vanishing of each Plücker coordinates on the columns of the matrix representing a point of the Grassmannian. This paper presents a way to make this procedure precise, producing a number for each matroid variety called its expected codimension that can be computed combinatorially solely from the…
Let G(d,n) denote the Grassmannian of d-planes in C^n and let T be the torus (C^*)^n/diag(C^*) which acts on G(d,n). Let x be a point of G(d,n) and let \bar{Tx} be the closure of the T-orbit through x. Then the class of the structure sheaf of \bar{Tx} in the K-theory of G(d,n) depends only on which Plücker coordinates of x are nonzero -- combinatorial data known as the matroid of x. In this paper, we will define a certain map of additive groups from the K-theory of G(d,n) to Z[t]. Letting g_x(t) denote the image of (-1)^{n-dim Tx} [ O_{\bar{Tx}}], g_x behaves nicely under the standard construc…
We show that there is no triangulation of the infinite real Grassmannian of k-planes in R^\infty which is nicely situated with respect to the coordinate axes. In terms of matroid theory, this says there is no triangulation of the Grassmannian subdividing the matroid stratification. This is proved by an argument in projective geometry, considering a specific sequence of configurations of points in the plane.
The Dressian and the tropical Grassmannian parameterize abstract and realizable tropical linear spaces; but in general, the Dressian is much larger than the tropical Grassmannian. There are natural positive notions of both of these spaces -- the positive Dressian, and the positive tropical Grassmannian (which we introduced roughly fifteen years ago) -- so it is natural to ask how these two positive spaces compare. In this paper we show that the positive Dressian equals the positive tropical Grassmannian. Using the connection between the positive Dressian and regular positroidal subdivisions of…
To every matroid, we associate a class in the K-theory of the Grassmannian. We study this class using the method of equivariant localization. In particular, we provide a geometric interpretation of the Tutte polynomial. We also extend results of the second author concerning the behavior of such classes under direct sum, series and parallel connection and two-sum; these results were previously only established for realizable matroids, and their earlier proofs were more difficult.
Le-diagrams are combinatorial objects that parametrize cells of the totally nonnegative Grassmannian, called positroid cells, and each Le-diagram gives rise to a cluster algebra which is believed to be isomorphic to the coordinate ring of the corresponding positroid variety. We study quivers arising from these diagrams and show that they can be constructed from the well-behaved quivers associated to Grassmannians by deleting and merging certain vertices. Then, we prove that quivers coming from arbitrary Le-diagrams, and more generally reduced plabic graphs, admit a particular sequence of mutat…
A positroid is the matroid of a real matrix with nonnegative maximal minors, a positroid variety is the closure of the locus of points in a complex Grassmannian whose matroid is a fixed positroid, and a positroid class is the cohomology class Poincaré dual to a positroid variety. We define a family of representations of general linear groups whose characters are symmetric polynomials representing positroid classes. These representations are certain diagram Schur modules in the sense of James and Peel. This gives a new algebraic interpretation of the Schubert structure constants for the product…
The positive Grassmannian $Gr_{k,n}^{\geq 0}$ is the subset of the real Grassmannian where all Plücker coordinates are nonnegative. It has a beautiful combinatorial structure as well as connections to statistical physics, integrable systems, and scattering amplitudes. The amplituhedron $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m}(Z)$ is the image of the positive Grassmannian $Gr_{k,n}^{\geq 0}$ under a positive linear map $\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^{k+m}$. We will explain how ideas from oriented matroids, tropical geometry, and cluster algebras shed light on the structure of the positive Grassmannian and the amplit…
We study realization spaces of matroids over hyperfields (in the sense of Baker and Bowler). More precisely, given a matroid M and a hyperfield H we determine the space of all H-matroids over M. This can be seen as the matroid stratum of the hyperfield Grassmannians in the sense of Anderson and Davis. We give different descriptions of these realization spaces (e.g., in terms of Tutte groups or projective classes), allowing for explicit computations. When the hyperfield at hand is topological, the realization spaces have a natural topology. In this case, our models carry the correct homeomorphi…
We launch the study of the tropicalization of the symplectic Grassmannian, that is, the space of all linear subspaces that are isotropic with respect to a fixed symplectic form. We formulate tropical analogues of several equivalent characterizations of the symplectic Grassmannian and determine all implications between them. In the process, we show that the Plücker and symplectic relations form a tropical basis if and only if the rank is at most 2. We provide plenty of examples that show that several features of the symplectic Grassmannian do not hold after tropicalizing. We show exactly when d…
In this paper we use toric geometry to investigate the topology of the totally non-negative part of the Grassmannian (Gr_{kn})_{\geq 0}. This is a cell complex whose cells Delta_G can be parameterized in terms of the combinatorics of plane-bipartite graphs G. To each cell Delta_G we associate a certain polytope P(G). The polytopes P(G) are analogous to the well-known Birkhoff polytopes, and we describe their face lattices in terms of matchings and unions of matchings of G. We also demonstrate a close connection between the polytopes P(G) and matroid polytopes. We then use the data of P(G) to d…
This is both an expository and research paper where we advocate a systematic study of continuous analogues of finite partially ordered sets, convex polytopes, oriented matroids, arrangements of subspaces, finite simplicial complexes, and other combinatorial structures. Among the illustrative examples are an Euler formula for a class of `continuous convex polytopes' (conjectured by Kalai and Wigderson), a duality result for a class of `continuous matroids', a calculation of the Euler characteristic of ideals in the Grassmannian poset (related to a problem of Gian-Carlo Rota), an exposition of t…
In recent work of Cachazo, Guevara, Mizera and the author, a generalization of the biadjoint scattering amplitude $m^{(k)}(\mathbb{I}_n,\mathbb{I}_n)$ was introduced as an integral over the moduli space of $n$ points in $\mathbb{CP}^{k-1}$, with value a sum of certain rational functions on the kinematic space $\mathcal{K}_{k,n}$. It was shown there for $m^{(3)}(\mathbb{I}_6,\mathbb{I}_6)$ and later by Cachazo and Rojas that collections of poles appearing in $m^{(3)}(\mathbb{I}_7,\mathbb{I}_7)$ are compatible exactly when they are dual to collections of rays which generate the maximal faces of …
