Quaternionic geometry of matroids

Building on a recent paper [8], here we argue that the combinatorics of matroids are intimately related to the geometry and topology of toric hyperkähler varieties. We show that just like toric varieties occupy a central role in Stanley’s proof for the necessity of McMullen’s conjecture (or g-inequalities) about the classification of face vectors of simplicial polytopes, the topology of toric hyperkähler varieties leads to new restrictions on face vectors of matroid complexes. Namely in this paper we will give two proofs that the injectivity part of the Hard Lefschetz theorem survives for toric hyperkähler varieties. We explain how this implies the g-inequalities for rationally representable matroids. We show how the geometrical intuition in the first proof, coupled with results of Chari [3], leads to a proof of the g-inequalities for general matroid complexes, which is a recent result of Swartz [20]. The geometrical idea in the second proof will show that a pure O-sequence should satisfy the g-inequalities, thus showing that our result is in fact a consequence of a long-standing conjecture of Stanley.