The number of faces of balanced Cohen-Macaulay complexes and a generalized Macaulay theorem (Q1106221)

A Cohen-Macaulay complex is said to be balanced of type \(a=(a_ 1,a_ 2,...,a_ s)\) if its vertices can be colored using s colors so that every maximal face gets exactly \(a_ i\) vertices of the ith color. For \(b=(b_ 1,b_ 2,...,b_ s)\), \(0\leq b\leq a\), let \(f_ b\) denote the number of faces having \(b_ i\) vertices of the ith color. Our main result gives a characterization of the f-vectors \(f=(f_ b)_{0\leq b\leq a'}\) or equivalently the h-vectors, which can arise in this way from balanced Cohen-Macaulay complexes. As part of the proof we establish a generalization of Macaulay's compression theorem to colored multicomplexes. Finally, a combinatorial shifting technique for multicomplexes is used to give a new simple proof of the original Macaulay theorem and another closely related result.