On Stable Rationality of Polytopes

Nicaise--Ottem introduced the notion of (stably) rational polytopes and studied this using a combinatorial description of the motivic volume. In this framework, we ask whether being non-stably rational is preserved under inclusions. We prove this holds for a large class of polytopes, leading to a combinatorial strategy for studying stable rationality of hypersurfaces in toric varieties. As a result, we obtain new bounds for non-stably rational hypersurface in projective space, improving the ones given by Schreieder when the field has characteristic 0. We also obtain similar bounds for double covers of projective space and some new classes of non-stably rational varieties in products of projective space.