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Topological Prismatoids and Small Simplicial Spheres of Large Diameter
We introduce topological prismatoids, a combinatorial abstraction of the
(geometric) prismatoids recently introduced by the second author to construct
counter-examples to the Hirsch conjecture. We show that the `strong -step
Theorem' that allows to construct such large-diameter polytopes from
`non--step' prismatoids still works at this combinatorial level. Then, using
metaheuristic methods on the flip graph, we construct four combinatorially
different non--step -dimensional topological prismatoids with
vertices. This implies the existence of -dimensional spheres with
vertices whose combinatorial diameter exceeds the Hirsch bound. These examples
are smaller that the previously known examples by Mani and Walkup in 1980 (
vertices, dimension ).
Our non-Hirsch spheres are shellable but we do not know whether they are
realizable as polytopes.Comment: 20 pages. Changes from v1 and v2: Reduced the part on shellability
and general improvement to accesibilit
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