Adjoints of Matroids

Abstract

We show that an adjoint of a loopless matroid is connected if and only if it itself is connected. Our first goal is to study the adjoint of modular matroids. We prove that a modular matroid has only one adjoint (up to isomorphism) which can be given by its opposite lattice, and proceed to present some alternative characterizations of modular matroids associated to adjoints and opposite lattices. The other purpose is to investigate the adjoint sequence $ad^0M,adM,ad^2M,\ldots$ of a connected matroid $M$. We classify such adjoint sequences into three types: finite, cyclic and convergent. For the first two types, the adjoint sequences eventually stabilize at the finite projective geometries except for free matroids. For the last type, the infinite non-repeating adjoint sequences are convergent to the infinite projective geometries.