Chow rings of vector space matroids

Abstract

The Chow ring of a matroid (or more generally, atomic latice) is an invariant whose importance was demonstrated by Adiprasito, Huh and Katz, who used it to resolve the long-standing Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture. Here, we make a detailed study of the Chow rings of uniform matroids and of matroids of finite vector spaces. In particular, we express the Hilbert series of such matroids in terms of permutation statistics; in the full rank case, our formula yields the maj-exc $q$-Eulerian polynomials of Shareshian and Wachs. We also provide a formula for the Charney-Davis quantities of such matroids, which can be expressed in terms of either determinants or $q$-secant numbers.