Liftable Point-Line Configurations: Defining Equations and Irreducibility of Associated Matroid and Circuit Varieties

Abstract

We study point-line configurations through the lens of projective geometry and matroid theory. Our focus is on their realisation spaces, where we introduce the concepts of liftable and quasi-liftable configurations, exploring cases in which an $n$-tuple of collinear points can be lifted to a non-degenerate realisation of a point-line configuration. We show that forest configurations are liftable and characterise the realisation space of liftable configurations as the solution set of certain linear systems of equations. Moreover, we study the Zariski closure of the realisation spaces of liftable and quasi-liftable configurations, known as matroid varieties, and establish their irreducibility. Additionally, we compute an irreducible decomposition for their corresponding circuit varieties. Applying these liftability properties, we present a procedure generate some of the defining equations of the associated matroid varieties. As corollaries, we provide a geometric representation for the defining equations of two specific examples: the quadrilateral set and the $3\times4$ grid. While the polynomials for the latter were previously computed using specialised algorithms tailored for this configuration, the geometric interpretation of these generators was missing. We compute a minimal generating set for the corresponding ideals.