On the Existence of Coproducts in Categories of q-Matroids

11/18/2021

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by   Heide Gluesing-Luerssen, et al.

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University of Kentucky

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q-Matroids form the q-analogue of classical matroids. In this paper we introduce various types of maps between q-matroids. These maps are not necessarily linear, but they must map subspaces to subspaces and respect the q-matroid structure in certain ways. The various types of maps give rise to different categories of q-matroids. We show that only one of these categories possesses a coproduct. This is the category where the morphisms are linear weak maps, that is, the rank of the image of any subspace is not larger than the rank of the subspace itself. The coproduct in this category is the very recently introduced direct sum of q-matroids.