Combinatorial mutations and block diagonal polytopes (Q2131124)

A combinatorial mutation, introduced in [\textit{M. Akhtar} et al., SIGMA, Symmetry Integrability Geom. Methods Appl. 8, Paper 094, 17 p. (2012; Zbl 1280.52014)], is a transformation of the Newton polytope of a Laurent polynomial undergoing mutation; which can be considered as a local transformation for lattice polytopes. The theory of combinatorial mutations was further developed by Higashitani from a combinatorial viewpoint, and later has been used to study combinatorial mutation equivalence classes of Newton-Okounkov bodies of flag varieties [\textit{N. Fujita} and \textit{A. Higashitani}, Int. Math. Res. Not. 2021, No. 12, 9567--9607 (2021; Zbl 07503553)]. For the Grassmannian \(\text{Gr}(k, n)\), a matching field is a map taking each Plücker variable to a permutation, and can be interpreted as a choice of initial term for the corresponding Plücker form. They were introduced by \textit{B. Sturmfels} and \textit{A. V. Zelevinsky} [Adv. Math. 98, No. 1, 65--112 (1993; Zbl 0776.13009)] to study the Newton polytope of a product of maximal minors of a generic matrix and have proved to be a useful tool in many contexts. In this paper, the authors use combinatorial mutations to find relations between matching field polytopes. In fact, each matching field \(\Lambda\) admits a toric ideal \(J_\Lambda\) with associated polytope \(P_\Lambda\), and they show that understanding the polytope associated to a matching field is equivalent to finding toric degenerations of the Grassmannian as the following: Theorem 1. Let \(\Lambda\) be a coherent matching field for the Grassmannian \(\text{Gr}(k, n)\) with polytope \(P_\Lambda\). If \(P_\Lambda\) is obtained from the Gelfand-Tsetlin polytope by a sequence of combinatorial mutations, then \(\Lambda\) gives rise to a toric degeneration of \(\text{Gr}(k, n)\). In particular, this paper investigate the block diagonal matching fields which are examples of coherent matching fields with particularly simple description. It shows that all block diagonal matching field polytopes are related by a sequence of combinatorial mutations: Theorem 2. Any pair of block diagonal matching field polytopes can be obtained from one another by a sequence of combinatorial mutations such that all intermediate polytopes are matching field polytopes. The matching fields associated to the intermediate polytopes can be thought of as interpolating between the block diagonal matching fields. As a result, the authors obtain a large family of toric degenerations for the Grassmannian given by matching fields.