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Quaternary Bicycle Matroids and the Penrose Polynomial for Delta-Matroids

In contrast to matroids, vf-safe delta-matroids have three kinds of minors and are closed under the operations of twist and loop complementation. We show that the delta-matroids representable over GF(4) with respect to the nontrivial automorphism of GF(4) form a subclass of the vf-safe delta-matroids closed under twist and loop complementation. In particular, quaternary matroids are vf-safe. Using this result, we show that the matroid of a bicycle space of a quaternary matroid M is obtained from M by using loop complementation. As a consequence, the matroid of a bicycle space of a quaternary matroid M is independent of the chosen representation. This also leads to, e.g., an extension of a known parity-type characterization of the bicycle dimension, a generalization of the tripartition of Rosenstiehl and Read [Ann. Disc. Math. (1978)], and a suitable generalization of the dual notions of bipartite and Eulerian binary matroids to a vf-safe delta-matroids. Finally, we generalize a number of results concerning the Penrose polynomial from binary matroids to vf-safe delta-matroids. In this general setting the Penrose polynomial turns out to have a recursive relation much like the recursive relation of the Tutte polynomial.