Roots of Ehrhart Polynomials of Smooth Fano Polytopes

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.Comment: 10 page

Roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of hypersimplices

The Ehrhart polynomial of the $d$-th hypersimplex $\Delta(d,n)$ of order $n$ is studied. By computational experiments and a known result for $d=2$, we conjecture that the real part of every roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\Delta(d,n)$ is negative and larger than $- \frac{n}{d}$ if $n \geq 2d$. In this paper, we show that the conjecture is true when $d=3$ and that every root $a$ of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\Delta(d,n)$ satisfies $-\frac{n}{d} < {\rm Re} (a) < 1$ if $4 \leq d \ll n$.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

Periods of Ehrhart Coefficients of Rational Polytopes

Let P⊂R^n be a polytope whose vertices have rational coordinates. By a seminal result of E. Ehrhart, the number of integer lattice points in the kth dilate of P (k a positive integer) is a quasi-polynomial function of k — that is, a "polynomial" in which the coefficients are themselves periodic functions of k. It is an open problem to determine which quasi-polynomials are the Ehrhart quasi-polynomials of rational polytopes. As partial progress on this problem, we construct families of polytopes in which the periods of the coefficient functions take on various prescribed values