The Waldschmidt constant for squarefree monomial ideals

Given a squarefree monomial ideal $I \subseteq R =k[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$, we show that $\widehat\alpha(I)$, the Waldschmidt constant of $I$, can be expressed as the optimal solution to a linear program constructed from the primary decomposition of $I$. By applying results from fractional graph theory, we can then express $\widehat\alpha(I)$ in terms of the fractional chromatic number of a hypergraph also constructed from the primary decomposition of $I$. Moreover, expressing $\widehat\alpha(I)$ as the solution to a linear program enables us to prove a Chudnovsky-like lower bound on $\widehat\alpha(I)$, thus verifying a conjecture of Cooper-Embree-H\`a-Hoefel for monomial ideals in the squarefree case. As an application, we compute the Waldschmidt constant and the resurgence for some families of squarefree monomial ideals. For example, we determine both constants for unions of general linear subspaces of $\mathbb{P}^n$ with few components compared to $n$, and we find the Waldschmidt constant for the Stanley-Reisner ideal of a uniform matroid.Comment: 26 pages. This project was started at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO) as part of the mini-workshop "Ideals of Linear Subspaces, Their Symbolic Powers and Waring Problems" held in February 2015. Comments are welcome. Revised version corrects some typos, updates the references, and clarifies some hypotheses. To appear in the Journal of Algebraic Combinatoric