Generalized Pitman-Stanley flow polytopes
The Pitman-Stanley polytope is a well-studied object in algebraic and enumerative combinatorics. It first appeared in work of Pitman and Stanley in connection with plane partitions, and has since been explored from many different perspectives. Geometrically, it can be described in terms of inequalities that force a vector to stay ``between two bounds in dominance order. Combinatorially, its lattice points encode plane partitions with entries restricted to \(0\) and \(1\).\N\NAn important step was made by Postnikov, who showed that the Pitman-Stanley polytope is in fact a \textit{generalized permutahedron}. Subsequently, Baldoni and Vergne gave a geometric realization of this polytope as a \textit{flow polytope} of a certain graph. This connection opened the door to applying methods from the theory of flows to combinatorial problems.\N\NThe present work takes up a natural generalization of the Pitman-Stanley polytope. Instead of restricting plane partitions to entries \(0\) and \(1\), one allows entries in \(\{0,1,\dots,m\}\) for a fixed \(m\). The corresponding generalized Pitman-Stanley polytope can be viewed as a space of nonnegative matrices subject to a family of dominance-type inequalities. A central observation of this paper is that this generalized polytope is again a \textit{flow polytope}, this time of a natural grid graph. This realization provides a unifying perspective: the underlying combinatorial objects (plane partitions with bounded entries) and the geometric structures (flow polytopes and generalized permutahedra) are two sides of the same coin.\N\NBuilding on this viewpoint, the paper develops several main results. First, it gives structural characterizations of the vertices of the generalized Pitman-Stanley polytope, both in terms of unsplittable flows on the grid and in terms of special ``vertex plane partitions. From these descriptions, formulas and recursions are obtained for counting vertices and faces of the polytope. Second, the authors study lattice points and volume: since lattice points correspond to bounded plane partitions, determinantal formulas can be derived for their enumeration, and explicit formulas for the volume are obtained, together with combinatorial interpretations in special cases. Altogether, these results illustrate the rich interplay between flow theory, generalized permutahedra, and algebraic combinatorics.
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