The uniform face ideals of a simplicial complex

We define the uniform face ideal of a simplicial complex with respect to an ordered proper vertex colouring of the complex. This ideal is a monomial ideal which is generally not squarefree. We show that such a monomial ideal has a linear resolution, as do all of its powers, if and only if the colouring satisfies a certain nesting property. In the case when the colouring is nested, we give a minimal cellular resolution supported on a cubical complex. From this, we give the graded Betti numbers in terms of the face-vector of the underlying simplicial complex. Moreover, we explicitly describe the Boij-S\"oderberg decompositions of both the ideal and its quotient. We also give explicit formul\ae\ for the codimension, Krull dimension, multiplicity, projective dimension, depth, and regularity. Further still, we describe the associated primes, and we show that they are persistent.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure

Linear syzygies, hyperbolic Coxeter groups and regularity

We show that the virtual cohomological dimension of a Coxeter group is essentially the regularity of the Stanley--Reisner ring of its nerve. Using this connection between geometric group theory and commutative algebra, as well as techniques from the theory of hyperbolic Coxeter groups, we study the behavior of the Castelnuovo--Mumford regularity of square-free quadratic monomial ideals. We construct examples of such ideals which exhibit arbitrarily high regularity after linear syzygies for arbitrarily many steps. We give a doubly logarithmic bound on the regularity as a function of the number of variables if these ideals are Cohen--Macaulay.Comment: 22 pages, v2: final version as in Compositio Mat

The toric h-vector of a cubical complex in terms of noncrossing partition statistics

This paper introduces a new and simple statistic on noncrossing partitions that expresses each coordinate of the toric $h$-vector of a cubical complex, written in the basis of the Adin $h$-vector entries, as the total weight of all noncrossing partitions. The same model may also be used to obtain a very simple combinatorial interpretation of the contribution of a cubical shelling component to the toric $h$-vector. In this model, a strengthening of the symmetry expressed by the Dehn-Sommerville equations may be derived from the self-duality of the noncrossing partition lattice, exhibited by the involution of Simion and Ullman

Manifolds of isospectral arrow matrices

An arrow matrix is a matrix with zeroes outside the main diagonal, first row, and first column. We consider the space $M_{St_n,\lambda}$ of Hermitian arrow $(n+1)\times (n+1)$-matrices with fixed simple spectrum $\lambda$. We prove that this space is a smooth $2n$-manifold, and its smooth structure is independent on the spectrum. Next, this manifold carries the locally standard torus action: we describe the topology and combinatorics of its orbit space. If $n\geqslant 3$, the orbit space $M_{St_n,\lambda}/T^n$ is not a polytope, hence this manifold is not quasitoric. However, there is a natural permutation action on $M_{St_n,\lambda}$ which induces the combined action of a semidirect product $T^n\rtimes\Sigma_n$. The orbit space of this large action is a simple polytope. The structure of this polytope is described in the paper. In case $n=3$, the space $M_{St_3,\lambda}/T^3$ is a solid torus with boundary subdivided into hexagons in a regular way. This description allows to compute the cohomology ring and equivariant cohomology ring of the 6-dimensional manifold $M_{St_3,\lambda}$ using the general theory developed by the first author. This theory is also applied to a certain $6$-dimensional manifold called the twin of $M_{St_3,\lambda}$. The twin carries a half-dimensional torus action and has nontrivial tangent and normal bundles.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

The combinatorics of hyperbolized manifolds

A topological version of a longstanding conjecture of H. Hopf, originally proposed by W. Thurston, states that the sign of the Euler characteristic of a closed aspherical manifold of dimension $d=2m$ depends only on the parity of $m$. Gromov defined several hyperbolization functors which produce an aspherical manifold from a given simplicial or cubical manifold. We investigate the combinatorics of several of these hyperbolizations and verify the Euler Characteristic Sign Conjecture for each of them. In addition, we explore further combinatorial properties of these hyperbolizations as they relate to several well-studied generating functions