Supersolvable saturated matroids and chordal graphs

Abstract

A matroid is supersolvable if it has a maximal chain of flats, each of which is modular. A matroid is saturated if every round flat is modular. In this article we present supersolvable saturated matroids as analogues to chordal graphs, and we show that several results for chordal graphs hold in this matroidal context. In particular, we consider matroid analogues of the reduced clique graph and clique trees for chordal graphs. The latter is a maximum-weight spanning tree of the former. We also show that the matroid analogue of a clique tree is an optimal decomposition for the matroid parameter of tree-width.