Lattice path matroids and quotients

Abstract

We characterize the quotients among lattice path matroids (LPMs) in terms of their diagrams. This characterization allows us to show that ordering LPMs by quotients yields a graded poset, whose rank polynomial has the Narayana numbers as coefficients. Furthermore, we study full lattice path flag matroids and show that—contrary to arbitrary positroid flag matroids—they correspond to points in the nonnegative flag variety. At the basis of this result lies an identification of certain intervals of the strong Bruhat order with lattice path flag matroids. A recent conjecture of Mcalmon, Oh, and Xiang states a characterization of quotients of positroids. We use our results to prove this conjecture in the case of LPMs.