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arxiv: 2503.06095 · v3 · pith:HPBEAAIQnew · submitted 2025-03-08 · 🧮 math.CO

Coefficients of univariate Tutte polynomials with one variable fixed

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keywords coefficientspolynomialpolynomialstuttecasesresultstermsfixed
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It is well known that the 2-variable Tutte polynomial of a graph $G$ includes chromatic polynomial and flow polynomial of $G$, i.e. the cases of $y=0$ and $x=0$. In 2013, K\'{a}lm\'{a}n introduced the interior and exterior polynomials which generalized the cases of $y=1$ and $x=1$ of Tutte polynomials of graphs to hypergraphs, and further polymatroids. There have been some results on coefficients of these polynomials, which motivate us to study uniformly the coefficients of $T_M(x,t)$ and $T_M(t,y)$, where $T_M(x,y)$ denotes the Tutte polynomial of a matroid $M$ and $t$ is a fixed real number. In this paper, we introduce two mutually dual parameters $f_k(M)$ and $g_k(M)$ ($g_1(M)$ is the girth of $M$) for any nonnegative integer $k$, and obtain the following results: (1) Formulas for coefficients of the higher-degree terms (related to $g_2(M)$ and $f_2(M)$, respectively) of $T_M(x,t)$ and $T_M(t,y)$ in terms of circuits and hyperplanes of $M$; (2) when $0\leq t \leq 1$, coefficients of the more higher-degree terms (related to $g_1(M)$ and $f_1(M)$, respectively) of $T_M(x,t)$ and $T_M(t,y)$ are further simplified and characterized; (3) As applications, some known results in the cases $t=0$ and $t=1$ are derived and generalized, and the unimodality of these coefficients in (1) are proved when $t\leq 1$.

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