Very recently, Galashin, Postnikov, and Williams introduced the notion of higher secondary polytopes, generalizing the secondary polytope of Gelfand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky. Given an $n$-point configuration $\mathcal{A}$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d-1}$, they define a family of convex $(n-d)$-dimensional polytopes $\widehatΣ_{1}, \ldots, \widehatΣ_{n-d}$. The $1$-skeletons of this family of polytopes are the flip graphs of certain combinatorial configurations which generalize triangulations of $\text{conv} \mathcal{A}$. We restrict our attention to $d=2$. First, we relate the $1$-skeleton of the Minkowski sum $\widehatΣ_{k} + \widehatΣ_{k-1}$ to the flip graph of "hypertriangulations" of the deleted $k$-sum of $\mathcal{A}$ when $\mathcal{A}$ consists of distinct points. Second, we compute the diameter of $\widehatΣ_{k}$ and $\widehatΣ_{k}+\widehatΣ_{k-1}$ for all $k$.
We prove that each bounded polytope can be represented as a polynomial zonotope, which we refer to as the Z-representation of polytopes. Previous representations are the vertex representation (V-representation) and the halfspace representation (H-representation). Depending on the polytope, the Z-representation can be more compact than the V-representation and the H-representation. In addition, the Z-representation enables the computation of linear maps, Minkowski addition, and convex hull with a computational complexity that is polynomial in the representation size. The usefulness of the new r…
This manuscript introduces a finite collection of generalized permutohedra associated to a simple graph. The first polytope of this collection is the graphical zonotope of the graph and the last is the graph-associahedron associated to it. We describe the weighted integer points enumerators for polytopes in this collection as Hopf algebra morphisms of combinatorial Hopf algebras of decorated graphs.
A cellular string of a polytope is a sequence of faces stacked on top of each other in a given direction. The poset of cellular strings, ordered by refinement, is known to be homotopy equivalent to a sphere. The subposet of coherent cellular strings is the face lattice of the fiber polytope, hence is homeomorphic to a sphere. In some special cases, every cellular string is coherent. Such polytopes are said to be all-coherent. We give a complete classification of zonotopes with the all-coherence property in terms of their oriented matroid structure. Although the face lattice of the fiber polyto…
Let $\mathcal P_Φ$ be the root polytope of a finite irreducible crystallographic root system $Φ$, i.e., the convex hull of all roots in $Φ$. The polar of $\mathcal P_Φ$, denoted $\mathcal P_Φ^*$, coincides with the union of the orbit of the fundamental alcove under the action of the Weyl group. In this paper, we establishes which polytopes $\mathcal P_Φ^*$ are zonotopes and which are not. The proof is constructive.
Minkowski's second theorem on successive minima gives an upper bound on the volume of a convex body in terms of its successive minima. We study the problem to generalize Minkowski's bound by replacing the volume by the lattice point enumerator of a convex body. In this context we are interested in bounds on the coefficients of Ehrhart polynomials of lattice polytopes via the successive minima. Our results for lattice zonotopes and lattice-face polytopes imply, in particular, that for 0-symmetric lattice-face polytopes and lattice parallelepipeds the volume can be replaced by the lattice point …
Monotone path polytopes arise as a special case of the construction of fiber polytopes, introduced by Billera and Sturmfels. A simple example is provided by the permutahedron, which is a monotone path polytope of the standard unit cube. The permutahedron is the zonotope polar to the braid arrangement. We show how the zonotopes polar to the cones of certain deformations of the braid arrangement can be realized as monotone path polytopes. The construction is an extension of that of the permutahedron and yields interesting connections between enumerative combinatorics of hyperplane arrangements a…
Zonotopes are a rich and fascinating family of polytopes, with connections to many areas of mathematics. In this article we provide a brief survey of classical and recent results related to lattice zonotopes. Our emphasis is on connections to combinatorics, both in the sense of enumeration (e.g. Ehrhart theory) and combinatorial structures (e.g. graphs and permutations).
A parallelotope $P$ is a polytope that admits a facet-to-facet tiling of space by translation copies of $P$ along a lattice. The Voronoi cell $P_V(L)$ of a lattice $L$ is an example of a parallelotope. A parallelotope can be uniquely decomposed as the Minkowski sum of a zone closed parallelotope $P$ and a zonotope $Z(U)$, where $U$ is the set of vectors used to generate the zonotope. In this paper we consider the related question: When is the Minkowski sum of a general parallelotope and a zonotope $P+Z(U)$ a parallelotope? We give two necessary conditions and show that the vectors $U$ have to …
We prove that any d-dimensional zonotope obtained from permutahedron by deleting zone vectors has belt diameter at most 3. Moreover if d is not greater than 6 then its belt diameter is bounded from above by 2. Also we show that these bounds are sharp. As a consequence we show that diameter of the edge graph of dual polytope for such zonotopes is not greater then 4 and 3 respectively.
We introduce and study a family of polytopes which can be seen as a generalization of the permutahedron of type $B_d$. We highlight connections with the largest possible diameter of the convex hull of a set of points in dimension $d$ whose coordinates are integers between $0$ and $k$, and with the computational complexity of multicriteria matroid optimization.
Let $X$ be a list of vectors that is totally unimodular. In a previous article the author proved that every real-valued function on the set of interior lattice points of the zonotope defined by $X$ can be extended to a function on the whole zonotope of the form $p(D)B_X$ in a unique way, where $p(D)$ is a differential operator that is contained in the so-called internal $\Pcal$-space. In this paper we construct an explicit solution to this interpolation problem in terms of Todd operators. As a corollary we obtain a slight generalisation of the Khovanskii-Pukhlikov formula that relates the volu…
For every d-dimensional polytope P with centrally symmetric facets we can associate a "subway map" such that every line of this "subway" corresponds to set of facets parallel to one of ridges P. The belt diameter of P is the maximal number of line changes that you need to do in order to get from one station to another. In this paper we prove that belt diameter of d-dimensional space-filling zonotope is not greater than $\lceil \log_2\frac45d\rceil$. Moreover we show that this bound can not be improved in dimensions d at most 6.
Equivariant Ehrhart theory generalizes the study of lattice point enumeration to also account for the symmetries of a polytope under a linear group action. We present a catalogue of techniques with applications in this field, including zonotopal decompositions, symmetric triangulations, combinatorial interpretation of the $h^\ast$-polynomial, and certificates for the (non)existence of invariant non-degenerate hypersurfaces. We apply these methods to several families of examples including hypersimplices, orbit polytopes, and graphic zonotopes, expanding the library of polytopes for which their …
Ardila and Develin's paper on tropical oriented hyperplane arrangements and tropical oriented matroids defines tropical oriented matroids and conjectures a bijection between them and triangulations of products of simplices $Δ_{n-1} \times Δ_{d-1}$. Oh and Yoo recently confirmed this conjecture; however, neither group addressed the case of hyperplanes that are not in generic position. These non-generic arrangements do not correspond to tropical oriented matroids, but they encode information about subdivisions of $Δ_{n-1} \times Δ_{d-1}$. This note considers the non-generic case and presents som…
For a given lattice polytope, two fundamental problems within the field of Ehrhart theory are to (1) determine if its (Ehrhart) $h^\ast$-polynomial is unimodal and (2) to determine if its Ehrhart polynomial has only positive coefficients. The former property of a lattice polytope is known as Ehrhart unimodality and the latter property is known as Ehrhart positivity. These two properties are often simultaneously conjectured to hold for interesting families of lattice polytopes, yet they are typically studied in parallel. As to answer a question posed at the 2017 Introductory Workshop to the MSR…
The secondary polytope of a point configuration A is a polytope whose face poset is isomorphic to the poset of all regular subdivisions of A. While the vertices of the secondary polytope - corresponding to the triangulations of A - are very well studied, there is not much known about the facets of the secondary polytope. The splits of a polytope, subdivisions with exactly two maximal faces, are the simplest examples of such facets and the first that were systematically investigated. The present paper can be seen as a continuation of these studies and as a starting point of an examination of th…
Ehrhart theory measures a polytope P discretely by counting the lattice points inside its dilates P, 2P, 3P, .... We compute the Ehrhart quasipolynomials of the standard Coxeter permutahedra for the classical Coxeter groups, expressing them in terms of the Lambert W function. A central tool is a description of the Ehrhart theory of a rational translate of an integer zonotope.
Given a configuration $A$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^{d-1}$, we introduce the higher secondary polytopes $Σ_{A,1},\dots, Σ_{A,n-d}$, which have the property that $Σ_{A,1}$ agrees with the secondary polytope of Gelfand--Kapranov--Zelevinsky, while the Minkowski sum of these polytopes agrees with Billera--Sturmfels' fiber zonotope associated with (a lift of) $A$. In a special case when $d=3$, we refer to our polytopes as higher associahedra. They turn out to be related to the theory of total positivity, specifically, to certain combinatorial objects called plabic graphs, introduced by the seco…
We show that h*-vectors of alcoved polytopes P in R^n (of Lie type A) are unimodal if they contain interior lattice points and their facets have lattice distance 1 to the set of interior lattice points. The maximal possible such distance for general alcoved polytopes is shown to be dim(P)-1. A secondary purpose of the paper is to serve as a guide to previous work surrounding unimodality of h*-vectors of alcoved polytopes and related questions.
Chow stability is one notion of Mumford's Geometric Invariant Theory for studying the moduli space of polarized varieties. Kapranov, Sturmfels and Zelevinsky detected that Chow stability of polarized toric varieties is determined by its inherent {\it secondary polytope}, which is a polytope whose vertices correspond to regular triangulations of the associated polytope \cite{KSZ}. In this paper, we give a purely convex-geometrical proof that the Chow form of a projective toric variety is $H$-semistable if and only if it is $H$-polystable with respect to the standard complex torus action $H$. Th…
In this paper we present an explicit combinatorial description of a special class of facets of the secondary polytopes of hypersimplices. These facets correspond to polytopal subdivisions called multi-splits. We show a relation between the cells in a multi-split of the hypersimplex and nested matroids. Moreover, we get a description of all multi-splits of a product of simplices. Additionally, we present a computational result to derive explicit lower bounds on the number of facets of secondary polytopes of hypersimplices.
We extend recent methods for parametric sequence alignment to the parameter space for scoring RNA folds. This involves the construction of an RNA polytope. A vertex of this polytope corresponds to RNA secondary structures with common branching. We use this polytope and its normal fan to study the effect of varying three parameters in the free energy model that are not determined experimentally. Our results indicate that variation of these specific parameters does not have a dramatic effect on the structures predicted by the free energy model. We additionally map a collection of known RNA secon…
The hyperdeterminant of format 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 is a polynomial of degree 24 in 16 unknowns which has 2894276 terms. We compute the Newton polytope of this polynomial and the secondary polytope of the 4-cube. The 87959448 regular triangulations of the 4-cube are classified into 25448 D-equivalence classes, one for each vertex of the Newton polytope. The 4-cube has 80876 coarsest regular subdivisions, one for each facet of the secondary polytope, but only 268 of them come from the hyperdeterminant.
Let $Δ$ be an $n$-dimensional lattice polytope. The smallest non-negative integer $i$ such that $k Δ$ contains no interior lattice points for $1 \leq k \leq n - i$ we call the degree of $Δ$. We consider lattice polytopes of fixed degree $d$ and arbitrary dimension $n$. Our main result is a complete classification of $n$-dimensional lattice polytopes of degree $d=1$. This is a generalization of the classification of lattice polygons $(n=2)$ without interior lattice points due to Arkinstall, Khovanskii, Koelman and Schicho. Our classification shows that the secondary polytope of a lattice polyto…
We give a self-contained introduction to the theory of secondary polytopes and geometric bistellar flips in triangulations of polytopes and point sets, as well as a review of some of the known results and connections to algebraic geometry, topological combinatorics, and other areas. As a new result, we announce the construction of a point set in general position with a disconnected space of triangulations. This shows, for the first time, that the poset of strict polyhedral subdivisions of a point set is not always connected.
Any totally positive $(k+m)\times n$ matrix induces a map $π_+$ from the positive Grassmannian ${\rm Gr}_+(k,n)$ to the Grassmannian ${\rm Gr}(k,k+m)$, whose image is the amplituhedron $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m}$ and is endowed with a top-degree form called the canonical form ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m})$. This construction was introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka, where they showed that ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,4})$ encodes scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. Moreover, the computation of ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m})$ is reduced to finding the triangulations of $\mathca…
We review three realizations of the associahedron that arise as secondary polytopes, from cluster algebras, and as Minkowski sums of simplices, and show that under any choice of parameters, the resulting associahedra are affinely non-equivalent.
The study of the moment map from the Grassmannian to the hypersimplex, and the relation between torus orbits and matroid polytopes, dates back to the foundational 1987 work of Gelfand-Goresky-MacPherson-Serganova. On the other hand, the amplituhedron is a very new object, defined by Arkani-Hamed-Trnka in connection with scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. In this paper we discover a striking duality between the moment map $μ:Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}\toΔ_{k+1,n}$ from the positive Grassmannian $Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}$ to the hypersimplex, and the amplituhedron map $\tilde{Z}…
In 2006, Kenyon and Okounkov computed the moduli space of Harnack curves of degree $d$ in $\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}^2$. We generalize to any projective toric surface some of the techniques used there. More precisely, we show that the moduli space $\mathcal{H}_Δ$ of Harnack curves with Newton polygon $Δ$ is diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^{m-3}\times\mathbb{R}_{\geq0}^{n+g-m}$ where $Δ$ has $m$ edges, $g$ interior lattice points and $n$ boundary lattice points, solving a conjecture of Crétois and Lang. Additionally, we use abstract tropical curves to construct a compactification of this moduli space b…
