The simplest causal inequalities and their violation

In a scenario where two parties share, act on and exchange some physical resource, the assumption that the parties' actions are ordered according to a definite causal structure yields constraints on the possible correlations that can be established. We show that the set of correlations that are compatible with a definite causal order forms a polytope, whose facets define causal inequalities. We fully characterize this causal polytope in the simplest case of bipartite correlations with binary inputs and outputs. We find two families of nonequivalent causal inequalities; both can be violated in the recently introduced framework of process matrices, which extends the standard quantum formalism by relaxing the implicit assumption of a fixed causal structure. Our work paves the way to a more systematic investigation of causal inequalities in a theory-independent way, and of their violation within the framework of process matrices.Comment: 7 + 4 pages, 2 figure

Looking for symmetric Bell inequalities

Finding all Bell inequalities for a given number of parties, measurement settings, and measurement outcomes is in general a computationally hard task. We show that all Bell inequalities which are symmetric under the exchange of parties can be found by examining a symmetrized polytope which is simpler than the full Bell polytope. As an illustration of our method, we generate 238885 new Bell inequalities and 1085 new Svetlichny inequalities. We find, in particular, facet inequalities for Bell experiments involving two parties and two measurement settings that are not of the Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu type.Comment: Joined the associated website as an ancillary file, 17 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

The brick polytope of a sorting network

The associahedron is a polytope whose graph is the graph of flips on triangulations of a convex polygon. Pseudotriangulations and multitriangulations generalize triangulations in two different ways, which have been unified by Pilaud and Pocchiola in their study of flip graphs on pseudoline arrangements with contacts supported by a given sorting network. In this paper, we construct the brick polytope of a sorting network, obtained as the convex hull of the brick vectors associated to each pseudoline arrangement supported by the network. We combinatorially characterize the vertices of this polytope, describe its faces, and decompose it as a Minkowski sum of matroid polytopes. Our brick polytopes include Hohlweg and Lange's many realizations of the associahedron, which arise as brick polytopes for certain well-chosen sorting networks. We furthermore discuss the brick polytopes of sorting networks supporting pseudoline arrangements which correspond to multitriangulations of convex polygons: our polytopes only realize subgraphs of the flip graphs on multitriangulations and they cannot appear as projections of a hypothetical multiassociahedron.Comment: 36 pages, 25 figures; Version 2 refers to the recent generalization of our results to spherical subword complexes on finite Coxeter groups (http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3349

Moment-angle manifolds and Panov's problem

We answer a problem posed by Panov, which is to describe the relationship between the wedge summands in a homotopy decomposition of the moment-angle complex corresponding to a disjoint union of k points and the connected sum factors in a diffeomorphism decomposition of the moment-angle manifold corresponding to the simple polytope obtained by making k vertex cuts on a standard d-simplex. This establishes a bridge between two very different approaches to moment-angle manifolds.Comment: In form accepted by International Mathematics Research Notices 201