Reducing the Large Set Threshold for Oertel's Conjecture on the Mixed-Integer Volume

Abstract

In 1960, Grünbaum proved that for any convex body $C\subset {\mathbb{R}}^d$ and every halfspace $H$ containing the centroid of $C$, one has that the volume of $H\cap C$ is at least a $\frac{1}{e}$-fraction of the volume of $C$. Recently, in 2014, Oertel conjectured that a similar result holds for mixed-integer convex sets. Concretely, he proposed that for any convex body $C\subset {\mathbb{R}}^{n+d}$, there should exist a point $\mathbf{x}\in S=C\cap ({\mathbb{Z}}^n\times {\mathbb{R}}^d)$ such that for every halfspace $H$ containing $\mathbf{x}$, one has that \[ \mathcal{H}_d(H\cap S) \geq \frac{1}{2^n}\frac{1}{e}\mathcal{H}_d(S), \] where ${\mathcal{H}}_d$ denotes the $d$-dimensional Hausdorff measure. While the conjecture remains open, Basu and Oertel proved in 2017 that the above inequality holds true for sufficiently large sets, in terms of a measure known as the \emph{lattice width} of a set. In this work, by following a geometric approach, we improve this result by substantially reducing the threshold at which a set can be considered large. We reduce this threshold from an exponential to a polynomial dependency on the dimension, therefore significantly enlarging the family of mixed-integer convex sets over which Oertel's conjecture holds true.