Elementary moves on lattice polytopes

Abstract

We introduce a graph structure on Euclidean polytopes. The vertices of this graph are the $d$-dimensional polytopes contained in ${\mathbb{R}}^d$ and its edges connect any two polytopes that can be obtained from one another by either inserting or deleting a vertex, while keeping their vertex sets otherwise unaffected. We prove several results on the connectivity of this graph, and on a number of its subgraphs. We are especially interested in several families of subgraphs induced by lattice polytopes, such as the subgraphs induced by the lattice polytopes with $n$ or $n+1$ vertices, that turn out to exhibit intriguing properties.

35 pages, 9 figures