Obstructions and dualities for matroid depth parameters

Abstract

Contraction$^*$-depth is considered to be one of the analogues of graph tree-depth in the matroid setting. In this paper, we investigate structural properties of contraction$^*$-depth of matroids representable over finite fields and rationals. In particular, we prove that the obstructions for contraction$^*$-depth for these classes of matroids are bounded in size. From this we derive analogous results for related notions of contraction-depth and deletion-depth. Moreover, we define a dual notion to contraction$^*$-depth, named deletion$^*$-depth, for $\mathbb{F}$-representable matroids, and by duality extend our results from contraction$^*$-depth to this notion.