Chow rings of matroids are Koszul

Abstract

Chow rings of matroids were instrumental in the resolution of the Heron-Rota-Welsh Conjecture by Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz and in the resolution of the Top-Heavy Conjecture by Braden, Huh, Matherne, Proudfoot, and Wang. The Chow ring of a matroid is a commutative, graded, Artinian, Gorenstein algebra with linear and quadratic relations defined by the matroid. Dotsenko conjectured that the Chow ring of any matroid is Koszul. The purpose of this paper is to prove Dotsenko's conjecture. We also show that the augmented Chow ring of a matroid is Koszul. As a corollary, we show that the Chow rings and augmented Chow rings of matroids have rational Poincar\'{e} series.