Rainbow and monochromatic circuits and cuts in binary matroids

Abstract

Given a matroid together with a coloring of its ground set, a subset of its elements is called rainbow colored if no two of its elements have the same color. We show that if a binary matroid of rank $r$ is colored with exactly $r$ colors, then $M$ either contains a rainbow colored circuit or a monochromatic cut. As the class of binary matroids is closed under taking duals, this immediately implies that if $M$ is colored with exactly $n-r$ colors, then $M$ either contains a rainbow colored cut or a monochromatic circuit. As a byproduct, we give a characterization of binary matroids in terms of reductions to partition matroids. Motivated by a conjecture of Bérczi et al., we also analyze the relation between the covering number of a binary matroid and the maximum number of colors or the maximum size of a color class in any of its rainbow circuit-free colorings. For simple graphic matroids, we show that there exists a rainbow circuit-free coloring that uses each color at most twice only if the graph is $(2,3)$-sparse, that is, it is independent in the $2$-dimensional rigidity matroid. Furthermore, we give a complete characterization of minimally rigid graphs admitting such a coloring.

15 pages, 1 figure