Transversal Lattices

Abstract

A flat of a matroid is cyclic if it is a union of circuits; such flats form a lattice under inclusion and, up to isomorphism, all lattices can be obtained this way. A lattice is a Tr-lattice if all matroids whose lattices of cyclic flats are isomorphic to it are transversal. We investigate some sufficient conditions for a lattice to be a Tr-lattice; a corollary is that distributive lattices of dimension at most two are Tr-lattices. We give a necessary condition: each element in a Tr-lattice has at most two covers. We also give constructions that produce new Tr-lattices from known Tr-lattices.