Connected matroids with a small circumference Original Research Article

Lemos and Oxley proved that if M is a connected matroid with |E(M)|⩾3r(M), then M has a circuit C such that M⧹C is connected. In this paper, we shall improve this result proving that for a simple and connected matroid M, if r(M)⩾7 and |E(M)|⩾3r(M)−3, then M has a circuit C such that M⧹C is connected. To prove this result, we shall construct all the connected matroids having circumference at most five, with the exception of those which are 3-connected and have rank five.