English

Building sets, Chow rings, and their Hilbert series

Combinatorics 2026-03-31 v2

Abstract

We establish formulas for the Hilbert series of the Chow ring of a polymatroid using arbitrary building sets. For braid matroids and minimal building sets, our results produce new formulas for the Poincar\'e polynomial of the moduli space M0,n+1\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{0,n+1} of pointed stable rational curves, and recover several previous results by Keel, Getzler, Manin, and Aluffi--Marcolli--Nascimento. We also use our methods to produce examples of matroids and building sets for which the corresponding Chow ring has Hilbert series with non-log-concave coefficients. This contrasts with the real-rootedness and log-concavity conjectures of Ferroni--Schr\"oter for matroids with maximal building sets, and of Aluffi--Chen--Marcolli for braid matroids with minimal building sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.16776,
  title  = {Building sets, Chow rings, and their Hilbert series},
  author = {Christopher Eur and Luis Ferroni and Jacob P. Matherne and Roberto Pagaria and Lorenzo Vecchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.16776},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages. Minor corrections. To appear in Selecta Mathematica