A quasi-tree expansion for the surface Tutte polynomial

Abstract

The surface Tutte polynomial has recently been generalised to pseudo-surfaces equipping it with recursive deletion-contraction relations. We use these relations to show that this generalisation naturally possesses a quasi-tree expansion. This extends quasi-tree expansions of the Bollob\'as-Riordan, Las Vergnas and Krushkal polynomials, which we recover from our main result.