Face numbers of Engstr\"om representations of matroids

Abstract

A classic problem in matroid theory is to find subspace arrangements, specifically hyperplane and pseudosphere arrangements, whose intersection posets are isomorphic to a prescribed geometric lattice. Engstr\"om recently showed how to construct an infinite family of such subspace arrangements, indexed by the set of finite regular CW complexes. In this note, we compute the face numbers of these representations (in terms of the face numbers of the indexing complexes) and give upper bounds on the total number of faces in these objects. In particular, we show that, for a fixed rank, the total number of faces in the Engstr\"om representation corresponding to a codimension one homotopy sphere arrangement is bounded above by a polynomial in the number of elements of the matroid with degree one less than its rank.