English

Ehrhart polynomials of partial permutohedra

Combinatorics 2024-03-12 v1

Abstract

For positive integers mm and nn, the partial permutohedron P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) is a certain integral polytope in Rm\mathbb{R}^m, which can be defined as the convex hull of the vectors from {0,1,,n}m\{0,1,\ldots,n\}^m whose nonzero entries are distinct. For n=m1n=m-1, P(m,m1)\mathcal{P}(m,m-1) is (after translation by (1,,1)(1,\ldots,1)) the polytope PmP_m of parking functions of length mm, and for nmn\ge m, P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) is combinatorially equivalent to an mm-stellohedron. The main result of this paper is an explicit expression for the Ehrhart polynomial of P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) for any mm and nn with nm1n\ge m-1. The result confirms the validity of a conjecture for this Ehrhart polynomial in arXiv:2207.14253, and the n=m1n=m-1 case also answers a question of Stanley regarding the number of integer points in PmP_m. The proof of the result involves transforming P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) to a unimodularly equivalent polytope in Rm+1\mathbb{R}^{m+1}, obtaining a decomposition of this lifted version of P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) with nm1n\ge m-1 as a Minkowski sum of dilated coordinate simplices, applying a result of Postnikov for the number of integer points in generalized permutohedra of this form, observing that this gives an expression for the Ehrhart polynomial of P(m,n)\mathcal{P}(m,n) with nm1n\ge m-1 as an edge-weighted sum over graphs (with loops and multiple edges permitted) on mm labelled vertices in which each connected component contains at most one cycle, and then applying standard techniques for the enumeration of such graphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.06975,
  title  = {Ehrhart polynomials of partial permutohedra},
  author = {Roger E. Behrend},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.06975},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

13 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:16:09.622Z