The Projected Faces Property and Polyhedral Relations

Margot (1994) in his doctoral dissertation studied extended formulations of combinatorial polytopes that arise from "smaller" polytopes via some composition rule. He introduced the "projected faces property" of a polytope and showed that this property suffices to iteratively build extended formulations of composed polytopes. For the composed polytopes, we show that an extended formulation of the type studied in this paper is always possible only if the smaller polytopes have the projected faces property. Therefore, this produces a characterization of the projected faces property. Affinely generated polyhedral relations were introduced by Kaibel and Pashkovich (2011) to construct extended formulations for the convex hull of the images of a point under the action of some finite group of reflections. In this paper we prove that the projected faces property and affinely generated polyhedral relation are equivalent conditions

Reflection groups and polytopes over finite fields, II

When the standard representation of a crystallographic Coxeter group $\Gamma$ is reduced modulo an odd prime $p$, a finite representation in some orthogonal space over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is obtained. If $\Gamma$ has a string diagram, the latter group will often be the automorphism group of a finite regular polytope. In Part I we described the basics of this construction and enumerated the polytopes associated with the groups of rank 3 and the groups of spherical or Euclidean type. In this paper, we investigate such families of polytopes for more general choices of $\Gamma$, including all groups of rank 4. In particular, we study in depth the interplay between their geometric properties and the algebraic structure of the corresponding finite orthogonal group.Comment: 30 pages (Advances in Applied Mathematics, to appear

Realization spaces of 4-polytopes are universal

Let $P\subset\R^d$ be a $d$-dimensional polytope. The {\em realization space} of~$P$ is the space of all polytopes $P'\subset\R^d$ that are combinatorially equivalent to~$P$, modulo affine transformations. We report on work by the first author, which shows that realization spaces of \mbox{4-dimensional} polytopes can be ``arbitrarily bad'': namely, for every primary semialgebraic set~$V$ defined over~$\Z$, there is a $4$-polytope $P(V)$ whose realization space is ``stably equivalent'' to~$V$. This implies that the realization space of a $4$-polytope can have the homotopy type of an arbitrary finite simplicial complex, and that all algebraic numbers are needed to realize all $4$- polytopes. The proof is constructive. These results sharply contrast the $3$-dimensional case, where realization spaces are contractible and all polytopes are realizable with integral coordinates (Steinitz's Theorem). No similar universality result was previously known in any fixed dimension.Comment: 10 page

Reflection Groups and Polytopes over Finite Fields, III

When the standard representation of a crystallographic Coxeter group is reduced modulo an odd prime p, one obtains a finite group G^p acting on some orthogonal space over Z_p . If the Coxeter group has a string diagram, then G^p will often be the automorphism group of a finite abstract regular polytope. In parts I and II we established the basics of this construction and enumerated the polytopes associated to groups of rank at most 4, as well as all groups of spherical or Euclidean type. Here we extend the range of our earlier criteria for the polytopality of G^p . Building on this we investigate the class of 3-infinity groups of general rank, and then complete a survey of those locally toroidal polytopes which can be described by our construction.Comment: Advances in Applied Mathematics (to appear); 19 page

Higher dimensional cluster combinatorics and representation theory

Higher Auslander algebras were introduced by Iyama generalizing classical concepts from representation theory of finite dimensional algebras. Recently these higher analogues of classical representation theory have been increasingly studied. Cyclic polytopes are classical objects of study in convex geometry. In particular, their triangulations have been studied with a view towards generalizing the rich combinatorial structure of triangulations of polygons. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between these two seemingly unrelated subjects. We study triangulations of even-dimensional cyclic polytopes and tilting modules for higher Auslander algebras of linearly oriented type A which are summands of the cluster tilting module. We show that such tilting modules correspond bijectively to triangulations. Moreover mutations of tilting modules correspond to bistellar flips of triangulations. For any d-representation finite algebra we introduce a certain d-dimensional cluster category and study its cluster tilting objects. For higher Auslander algebras of linearly oriented type A we obtain a similar correspondence between cluster tilting objects and triangulations of a certain cyclic polytope. Finally we study certain functions on generalized laminations in cyclic polytopes, and show that they satisfy analogues of tropical cluster exchange relations. Moreover we observe that the terms of these exchange relations are closely related to the terms occuring in the mutation of cluster tilting objects.Comment: 41 pages. v4: minor corrections throughout the pape