Bounds on the Coefficients of Tension and Flow Polynomials

The goal of this article is to obtain bounds on the coefficients of modular and integral flow and tension polynomials of graphs. To this end we make use of the fact that these polynomials can be realized as Ehrhart polynomials of inside-out polytopes. Inside-out polytopes come with an associated relative polytopal complex and, for a wide class of inside-out polytopes, we show that this complex has a convex ear decomposition. This leads to the desired bounds on the coefficients of these polynomials.Comment: 16 page

One-Point Suspensions and Wreath Products of Polytopes and Spheres

It is known that the suspension of a simplicial complex can be realized with only one additional point. Suitable iterations of this construction generate highly symmetric simplicial complexes with various interesting combinatorial and topological properties. In particular, infinitely many non-PL spheres as well as contractible simplicial complexes with a vertex-transitive group of automorphisms can be obtained in this way.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

The geometry and combinatorics of cographic toric face rings

In this paper we define and study a ring associated to a graph that we call the cographic toric face ring, or simply the cographic ring. The cographic ring is the toric face ring defined by the following equivalent combinatorial structures of a graph: the cographic arrangement of hyperplanes, the Voronoi polytope, and the poset of totally cyclic orientations. We describe the properties of the cographic ring and, in particular, relate the invariants of the ring to the invariants of the corresponding graph. Our study of the cographic ring fits into a body of work on describing rings constructed from graphs. Among the rings that can be constructed from a graph, cographic rings are particularly interesting because they appear in the study of compactified Jacobians of nodal curves.Comment: 27 pages; final version, to appear in Algebra & Number Theor

Virtual polytopes

Originating in diverse branches of mathematics, from polytope algebra and toric varieties to the theory of stressed graphs, virtual polytopes represent a natural algebraic generalization of convex polytopes. Introduced as the Grothendick group associated to the semigroup of convex polytopes, they admit a variety of geometrizations. A selection of applications demonstrates their versatility

Associahedra via spines

An associahedron is a polytope whose vertices correspond to triangulations of a convex polygon and whose edges correspond to flips between them. Using labeled polygons, C. Hohlweg and C. Lange constructed various realizations of the associahedron with relevant properties related to the symmetric group and the classical permutahedron. We introduce the spine of a triangulation as its dual tree together with a labeling and an orientation. This notion extends the classical understanding of the associahedron via binary trees, introduces a new perspective on C. Hohlweg and C. Lange's construction closer to J.-L. Loday's original approach, and sheds light upon the combinatorial and geometric properties of the resulting realizations of the associahedron. It also leads to noteworthy proofs which shorten and simplify previous approaches.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures. Version 5: minor correction

Virtual Polytopes

Originating in diverse branches of mathematics, from polytope algebra and toric varieties to the theory of stressed graphs, virtual polytopes represent a natural algebraic generalization of convex polytopes. Introduced as elements of the Grothendieck group associated to the semigroup of convex polytopes, they admit a variety of geometrizations. The present survey connects the theory of virtual polytopes with other geometrical subjects, describes a series of geometrizations together with relations between them, and gives a selection of applications