Detachable Pairs in 3-Connected Matroids

The classical tool at the matroid theorist’s disposal when dealing with the common problem of wanting to remove a single element from a 3-connected matroid without losing 3-connectivity is Tutte’s Wheels-and-Whirls Theorem. However, situations arise where one wishes to delete or contract a pair of elements from a 3-connected matroid whilst maintaining 3-connectedness. The goal of this research was to provide a new tool for making such arguments. Let M be a 3-connected matroid. A detachable pair in M is a pair x, y ∈ E(M) such that either M\x, y or M/x, y is 3-connected. Naturally, our aim was to find the necessary conditions on M which guarantee the existence of a detachable pair. Triangles and triads are an obvious barrier to overcome, and can be done so by allowing the use of a Δ − Y exchange. Apart from these matroids with three-element 3-separating sets, the only other class of matroids that fail to contain a detachable pair for which no bound can be placed on the size of the ground set is the class of spikes. In particular, we prove the following result. Let M be a 3-connected matroid with at least thirteen elements. If M is not a spike, then either M contains a detachable pair, or there exists a matroid M′ where M′ is obtained by performing a single Δ − Y exchange on either M or M* such that M′ contains a detachable pair. As well as being an important theorem in its own right, we anticipate that this result will be essential in future attempts to extend Seymour’s Splitter Theorem in a comparable manner; where the goal would be to obtain a detachable pair as well as maintaining a 3-connected minor. As such, much work has been done herein to study the precise configurations that arise in 3-separating subsets which themselves yield no detachable pair.