Consider a lattice in a real finite dimensional vector space. Here, we are interested in the lattice polytopes, that is the convex hulls of finite subsets of the lattice. Consider the group $G$ of the affine real transformations which map the lattice onto itself. Replacing the group of euclidean motions by the group $G$ one can define the notion of regular lattice polytopes. More precisely, a lattice polytope is said to be regular if the subgroup of $G$ which preserves the polytope acts transitively on the set of its complete flags. Recently, Karpenkov obtained a classification of the regular lattice polytopes. Here we obtain this classification by a more conceptual method. Another difference is that Karpenkov uses in an essential way the classification of the euclidean regular polytopes, but we don't.
Recent work has focused on the roots z of the Ehrhart polynomial of a lattice polytope P. The case when Re(z) = -1/2 is of particular interest: these polytopes satisfy Golyshev's "canonical line hypothesis". We characterise such polytopes when dim(P) <= 7. We also consider the "half-strip condition", where all roots z satisfy -dim(P)/2 <= Re(z) <= dim(P)/2-1, and show that this holds for any reflexive polytope with dim(P) <= 5. We give an example of a 10-dimensional reflexive polytope which violates the half-strip condition, thus improving on an example by Ohsugi--Shibata in dimension 34.
In this paper we show that the pipe dream complex associated to the permutation 1n(n-1)...2 can be geometrically realized as a triangulation of the vertex figure of a root polytope. Leading up to this result we show that the Grothendieck polynomial specializes to the h-polynomial of the corresponding pipe dream complex, which in certain cases equals the h-polynomial of canonical triangulations of root (and flow) polytopes, which in turn equals a specialization of the reduced form of a monomial in the subdivision algebra of root (and flow) polytopes. Thus, we connect Grothendieck polynomials to…
In this paper, we study the Ehrhart polynomial of the dual of the root polytope of type C of dimension $d$, denoted by $C_d^*$. We prove that the roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of $C_d^*$ have the same real part $-1/2$, and we also prove that the Ehrhart polynomials of $C_d^*$ for $d=1,2,\cdots$ has the interlacing property.
Let $Φ$ be an irreducible crystallographic root system and $\mathcal P$ its root polytope, i.e., its convex hull. We provide a uniform construction, for all root types, of a triangulation of the facets of $\mathcal P$. We also prove that, on each orbit of facets under the action of the Weyl gruop, the triangulation is unimodular with respect to a root sublattice that depends on the orbit.
We completely characterize the faces of the root polytope $\tilde Q_G = \text{conv}\{\mathbf 0, \mathbf e_i - \mathbf e_j\: (i,j) \in E(G)\}$ combinatorially. Our results specialize to state of the art results in a straightforward way.
Subword complexes are simplicial complexes introduced by Knutson and Miller to illustrate the combinatorics of Schubert polynomials and determinantal ideals. They proved that any subword complex is homeomorphic to a ball or a sphere and asked about their geometric realizations. We show that a family of subword complexes can be realized geometrically via regular triangulations of root polytopes. This implies that a family of $β$-Grothendieck polynomials are special cases of reduced forms in the subdivision algebra of root polytopes. We can also write the volume and Ehrhart series of root polyto…
We show that lattice polytopes cut out by root systems of classical type are normal and Koszul, generalizing a well-known result of Bruns, Gubeladze, and Trung in type A. We prove similar results for Cayley sums of collections of polytopes whose Minkowski sums are cut out by root systems. The proofs are based on a combinatorial characterization of diagonally split toric varieties.
The symmetric edge polytopes of odd cycles (del Pezzo polytopes) are known as smooth Fano polytopes. In this paper, we show that if the length of the cycle is 127, then the Ehrhart polynomial has a root whose real part is greater than the dimension. As a result, we have a smooth Fano polytope that is a counterexample to the two conjectures on the roots of Ehrhart polynomials.
A theorem of Howe states that every 3-dimensional lattice polytope $P$ whose only lattice points are its vertices, is a Cayley polytope, i.e. $P$ is the convex hull of two lattice polygons with distance one. We want to generalize this result by classifying 3-dimensional lattice polytopes without interior lattice points. The main result will be, that they are up to finite many exceptions either Cayley polytopes or there is a projection, which maps the polytope to the double unimodular 2-simplex. To every such polytope we associate a smooth projective surface of genus 0.
Given arbitrary integers $k$ and $d$ with $0 \leq 2k \leq d$, we construct a Gorenstein Fano polytope $\Pc \subset \RR^d$ of dimension $d$ such that (i) its Ehrhart polynomial $i(\Pc, n)$ possesses $d$ distinct roots; (ii) $i(\Pc, n)$ possesses exactly $2k$ imaginary roots; (iii) $i(\Pc, n)$ possesses exactly $d - 2k$ real roots; (iv) the real part of each of the imaginary roots is equal to $- 1 / 2$; (v) all of the real roots belong to the open interval $(-1, 0)$.
V. Golyshev conjectured that for any smooth polytope P of dimension at most five, the roots $z\in\C$ of the Ehrhart polynomial for P have real part equal to -1/2. An elementary proof is given, and in each dimension the roots are described explicitly. We also present examples which demonstrate that this result cannot be extended to dimension six.
The convex hull of the roots of a classical root lattice is called a root polytope. We determine explicit unimodular triangulations of the boundaries of the root polytopes associated to the root lattices A_n, C_n, and D_n, and compute their f-and h-vectors. This leads us to recover formulae for the growth series of these root lattices, which were first conjectured by Conway-Mallows-Sloane and Baake-Grimm and proved by Conway-Sloane and Bacher-de la Harpe-Venkov.
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 introduce the package LatticePolytopes for Macaulay2. The package provides methods for computations related to Cayley structures, local positivity and smoothness for lattice polytopes.
After giving a short introduction on smooth lattice polytopes, I will present a proof for the finiteness of smooth lattice polytopes with few lattice points. The argument is then turned into an algorithm for the classification of smooth lattice polytopes in fixed dimension with an upper bound on the number of lattice points. Additionally I have implemented this algorithm for dimension two and three and used it, together with a classification of smooth minimal fans by Tadao Oda, to create lists of all smooth 2-polytopes and 3-polytopes with at most 12 lattice points.
Given a lattice polytope $P$ (with underlying lattice $\lo$), the universal counting function $\uu_P(\lo')=|P\cap \lo'|$ is defined on all lattices $\lo'$ containing $\lo$. Motivated by questions concerning lattice polytopes and the Ehrhart polynomial, we study the equation $\uu_P=\uu_Q$.
Triangulations of a product of two simplices and, more generally, of root polytopes are closely related to Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinsky's theory of discriminants, to tropical geometry, tropical oriented matroids, and to generalized permutohedra. We introduce a new approach to these objects, identifying a triangulation of a root polytope with a certain bijection between lattice points of two generalized permutohedra. In order to study such bijections, we define trianguloids as edge-colored graphs satisfying simple local axioms. We prove that trianguloids are in bijection with triangulations of r…
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.
We study the root polytope $\mathcal P_Φ$ of a finite irreducible crystallographic root system $Φ$ using its relation with the abelian ideals of a Borel subalgebra of a simple Lie algebra with root system $Φ$. We determine the hyperplane arrangement corresponding to the faces of codimension 2 of $\mathcal P_Φ$ and analyze its relation with the facets of $\mathcal P_Φ$. For $Φ$ of type $A_n$ or $C_n$, we show that the orbits of some special subsets of abelian ideals under the action of the Weyl group parametrize a triangulation of $\mathcal P_Φ$. We show that this triangulation restricts to a t…
Generalized alcoved polytopes are polytopes whose facet normals are roots in a given root system. We call a set of points in an alcoved polytope a generating set if there does not exist a strictly smaller alcoved polytope containing it. The type $A$ alcoved polytopes are precisely the tropical polytopes that are also convex in the usual sense. In this case the tropical generators form a generating set. We show that for any root system other than $F_4$, every alcoved polytope invariant under the natural Weyl group action has a generating set of cardinality equal to the Coxeter number of the roo…
Lattices generated by lattice points in skeletons of reflexive polytopes are essential in determining the fundamental group and integral cohomology of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces. Here we prove that the lattice generated by all lattice points in a reflexive polytope is already generated by lattice points in codimension two faces. This answers a question of J. Morgan.
We study a class of polynomials that has all of its roots on the critical line and shares many properties with Ehrhart polynomials. Braun showed that the roots of Ehrhart polynomials are bounded quadratically and Higashitani provided examples for polytopes whose Ehrhart polynomial roots come close to this bound. In the case of polytopes which have their roots on the critical line, we present an improved bound. As a side effect this confirms a special case of a conjecture of Braun.
The polymake software system deals with convex polytopes and related objects from geometric combinatorics. This note reports on a new implementation of a subclass for lattice polytopes. The features displayed are enabled by recent changes to the polymake core, which will be discussed briefly.
We define Q-normal lattice polytopes. Natural examples of such polytopes are Cayley sums of strictly combinatorially equivalent lattice polytopes, which correspond to particularly nice toric fibrations, namely toric projective bundles. In a recent paper Batyrev and Nill have suggested that there should be a bound, N(d), such that every lattice polytope of degree d and dimension at least N(d) decomposes as a Cayley sum. We give a sharp answer to this question for smooth Q-normal polytopes. We show that any smooth Q-normal lattice polytope P of dimension n and degree d is a Cayley sum of strictl…
Several polytopes arise from finite graphs. For edge and symmetric edge polytopes, in particular, exhaustive computation of the Ehrhart polynomials not merely supports the conjecture of Beck {\it et al.}\ that all roots $α$ of Ehrhart polynomials of polytopes of dimension $D$ satisfy $-D \le \Re(α) \le D - 1$, but also reveals some interesting phenomena for each type of polytope. Here we present two new conjectures: (1) the roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of an edge polytope for a complete multipartite graph of order $d$ lie in the circle $|z+\tfrac{d}{4}| \le \tfrac{d}{4}$ or are negative int…
Let $Φ$ be a finite crystallographic irreducible root system and $\mathcal P_Φ$ be the convex hull of the roots in $Φ$. We give a uniform explicit description of the polytope $\mathcal P_Φ$, analyze the algebraic-combinatorial structure of its faces, and provide connections with the Borel subalgebra of the associated Lie algebra. We also give several enumerative results.
The reflexive dimension refldim(P) of a lattice polytope P is the minimal d so that P is the face of some d-dimensional reflexive polytope. We show that refldim(P) is finite for every P, and give bounds for refldim(kP) in terms of refldim(P) and k.
The Ehrhart polynomial of a convex lattice polytope counts integer points in integral dilates of the polytope. We present new linear inequalities satisfied by the coefficients of Ehrhart polynomials and relate them to known inequalities. We also investigate the roots of Ehrhart polynomials. We prove that for fixed d, there exists a bounded region of C containing all roots of Ehrhart polynomials of d-polytopes, and that all real roots of these polynomials lie in [-d, [d/2]). In contrast, we prove that when the dimension d is not fixed the positive real roots can be arbitrarily large. We finish …
In this paper, we study the root distributions of Ehrhart polynomials of free sums of certain reflexive polytopes. We investigate cases where the roots of the Ehrhart polynomials of the free sums of $A_d^\vee$'s or $A_d$'s lie on the canonical line $\mathrm{Re}(z)=-\frac{1}{2}$ on the complex plane $\mathbb{C}$, where $A_d$ denotes the root polytope of type A of dimension $d$ and $A_d^\vee$ denotes its polar dual. For example, it is proved that $A_m^\vee \oplus A_n^\vee$ with $\min\{m,n\} \leq 1$ or $m+n \leq 7$, $A_2^\vee \oplus (A_1^\vee)^{\oplus n}$ and $A_3^\vee \oplus (A_1^\vee)^{\oplus n…
We give an effective upper bound on the h^*-polynomial of a lattice polytope in terms of its degree and leading coefficient, confirming a conjecture of Batyrev. We deduce this bound as a consequence of a strong Cayley decomposition theorem which says, roughly speaking, that any lattice polytope with a large multiple that has no interior lattice points has a nontrivial decomposition as a Cayley sum of polytopes of smaller dimension. In an appendix, we interpret this result in terms of adjunction theory for toric varieties.
We provide a complete classification up to isomorphism of all smooth convex lattice 3-polytopes with at most 16 lattice points. There exist in total 103 different polytopes meeting these criteria. Of these, 99 are strict Cayley polytopes and the remaining 4 are obtained as inverse stellar subdivisions of such polytopes. We derive a classification, up to isomorphism, of all smooth embeddings of toric threefolds in $\mathbb{P}^N$ where $N\le 15$. Again we have in total 103 such embeddings. Of these, 99 are projective bundles embedded in $\mathbb{P}^N$ and the remaining 4 are blow-ups of such tor…
We use the method of steepest descents to study the root distribution of the Ehrhart polynomial of the $d$-dimensional cross-polytope, namely $\mathcal{L}_{d}$, as $d\rightarrow \infty$. We prove that the distribution function of the roots, approximately, as $d$ grows, by variation of argument of the generating function $\sum_{m\geq 0}\mathcal{L}_{d}(m)t^{m+x-1}=(1+t)^{d}(1-t)^{-d-1}t^{x-1}$, as $t$ varies appropriately on the segment of the imaginary line contained inside the unit disk.
Greene's rational function $Ψ_P({\bf x})$ is a sum of certain rational functions in ${\bf x}=(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ over the linear extensions of the poset $P$ (which has $n$ elements), which he introduced in his study of the Murnaghan-Nakayama formula for the characters of the symmetric group. In recent work Boussicault, Féray, Lascoux and Reiner showed that $Ψ_P({\bf x})$ equals a valuation on a cone and calculated $Ψ_P({\bf x})$ for several posets this way. In this paper we give an expression for $Ψ_P({\bf x})$ for any poset $P$. We obtain such a formula using dissections of root polytopes. Mo…
The polytopes $\mathcal{U}_{I,\bar{J}}$ were introduced by Ceballos, Padrol, and Sarmiento to provide a geometric approach to the study of $(I,\bar{J})$-Tamari lattices. They observed a connection between certain $\mathcal{U}_{I,\bar{J}}$ and acyclic root polytopes, and wondered if Mészáros' subdivision algebra can be used to subdivide all $\mathcal{U}_{I,\bar{J}}$. We answer this in the affirmative from two perspectives, one using flow polytopes and the other using root polytopes. We show that $\mathcal{U}_{I,\bar{J}}$ is integrally equivalent to a flow polytope that can be subdivided using t…
We present a formula for the degree of the discriminant of a smooth projective toric variety associated to a lattice polytope P, in terms of the number of integral points in the interior of dilates of faces of dimension greater or equal than $\lceil \frac {\dim P} 2 \rceil$.
The type A_n full root polytope is the convex hull in R^{n+1} of the origin and the points e_i-e_j for 1<= i<j <= n+1. Given a tree T on the vertex set [n+1], the associated root polytope P(T) is the intersection of the full root polytope with the cone generated by the vectors e_i-e_j, where (i, j) is an edge of T, i<j. The reduced forms of a certain monomial m[T] in commuting variables x_{ij} under the reduction x_{ij}x_{jk} --> x_{ik}x_{ij}+x_{jk}x_{ik}+βx_{ik}, can be interpreted as triangulations of P(T). Using these triangulations, the volume and Ehrhart polynomial of P(T) are obtained. I…
This paper presents an algorithm to compute the value of the inverse Laplace transforms of rational functions with poles on arrangements of hyperplanes. As an application, we present an efficient computation of the partition function for classical root systems.
The Voronoi conjecture on parallelohedra claims that for every convex polytope $P$ that tiles Euclidean $d$-dimensional space with translations there exists a $d$-dimensional lattice such that $P$ and the Voronoi polytope of this lattice are affinely equivalent. The Voronoi conjecture is still open for the general case but it is known that some combinatorial restriction for the face structure of $P$ ensure that the Voronoi conjecture holds for $P$. In this paper we prove that if $P$ is the Voronoi polytope of one of the dual root lattices $\mathsf{D}_d^*$, $\mathsf{E}_6^*$, $\mathsf{E}_7^*$ or…
The square root rank of a nonnegative matrix $A$ is the minimum rank of a matrix $B$ such that $A=B \circ B$, where $\circ$ denotes entrywise product. We show that the square root rank of the slack matrix of the correlation polytope is exponential. Our main technique is a way to lower bound the rank of certain matrices under arbitrary sign changes of the entries using properties of the roots of polynomials in number fields. The square root rank is an upper bound on the positive semidefinite rank of a matrix, and corresponds the special case where all matrices in the factorization are rank-one.
In this paper, we give an algebro-geometric characterization of Cayley polytopes. As a special case, we also characterize lattice polytopes with lattice width one by using Seshadri constants.
The full root polytope of type $A$ is the convex hull of all pairwise differences of the standard basis vectors which we represent by forward and backward arrows. We completely classify all flag triangulations of this polytope that are uniform in the sense that the edges may be described as a function of the relative order of the indices of the four basis vectors involved. These fifteen triangulations fall naturally into three classes: three in the lex class, three in the revlex class and nine in the Simion class. We also consider a refined face count where we distinguish between forward and b…
R. P. Stanley proved the Upper Bound Conjecture in 1975. We imitate his proof for the Ehrhart rings. We give some upper bounds for the volume of integrally closed lattice polytopes. We derive some inequalities for the delta-vector of integrally closed lattice polytopes. Finally we apply our results for reflexive integrally closed and order polytopes.
Given a crystallographic reduced root system and an element v of the lattice generated by the roots we study the minimum number |v|, called the length of v, of roots needed to express v as sum of roots. This number is related to the linear functionals presenting the convex hull of the roots; the map v --> |v| turns out to be piecewise quasi-linear with quasi-linearity domains the cones over the facets of this convex hull. In order to show this relation we investigate the integral closure of the monoid generated by the roots in a facet. We study also the positive lenght, i.e. the minimum number…
Let G be a connected bipartite graph with color classes E and V and root polytope Q. Regarding the hypergraph (V,E) induced by G, we prove that its interior polynomial is equivalent to the Ehrhart polynomial of Q, which in turn is equivalent to the h-vector of any triangulation of Q. It follows that the interior polynomials of (V,E) and its transpose (E,V) agree. When G is a complete bipartite graph, our result recovers a well known hypergeometric identity due to Saalschütz. It also implies that certain extremal coefficients in the Homfly polynomial of a special alternating link can be read of…
We determine lattice polytopes of smallest volume with a given number of interior lattice points. We show that the Ehrhart polynomials of those with one interior lattice point have largest roots with norm of order n^2, where n is the dimension. This improves on the previously best known bound n and complements a recent result of Braun where it is shown that the norm of a root of an Ehrhart polynomial is at most of order n^2. For the class of 0-symmetric lattice polytopes we present a conjecture on the smallest volume for a given number of interior lattice points and prove the conjecture for cr…
We give a new definition of lattice-face polytopes by removing an unnecessary restriction in the paper "Ehrhart polynomials of lattice-face polytopes", and show that with the new definition, the Ehrhart polynomial of a lattice-face polytope still has the property that each coefficient is the normalized volume of a projection of the original polytope. Furthermore, we show that the new family of lattice-face polytopes contains all possible combinatorial types of rational polytopes.
A lattice polytope $P$ is called IDP if any lattice point in its $k$th dilate is a sum of $k$ lattice points in $P$. In 1991 Stanley proved a strong inequality in Ehrhart theory for IDP lattice polytopes. We show that his conclusion holds under much milder assumptions, namely if the lattice polytope $P$ is spanning, i.e., any lattice point of the ambient lattice is an integer affine combination of lattice points in $P$. As an application, we get a generalization of Hibi's Lower Bound Theorem. Our proof relies on generalizing Bertini's theorem to the semistandard situation and Harris' Uniform P…
We classify the three-dimensional lattice polytopes with two interior lattice points. Up to unimodular equivalence there are 22,673,449 such polytopes. This classification allows us to verify, for this case only, a conjectural upper bound for the volume of a lattice polytope with interior points, and provides strong evidence for new conjectural inequalities on the coefficients of the Ehrhart polynomial in dimension three.
A lattice path matroid is a transversal matroid corresponding to a pair of lattice paths on the plane. A matroid base polytope is the polytope whose vertices are the incidence vectors of the bases of the given matroid. In this paper, we study facial structures of matroid base polytopes corresponding to lattice path matroids.
