Matroidal representations of low rank

Abstract

We study tropical subrepresentations of the Boolean regular representation $\mathbb{B}[G]$ of a finite group $G$. These are equivalent to the matroids on ground set $G$ for which left-multiplication by each element of $G$ is a matroid automorphism. We completely classify the tropical subrepresentations of $\mathbb{B}[G]$ for rank 3. When $G$ is an abelian group, our approach can be seen as a generalization of Golomb rulers. In doing so, we also introduce an interesting class of matroids obtained from equivalence relations on finite sets.