The Minkowski property and reflexivity of marked poset polytopes (Q2290354)

Generalizing Stanley's order and chain polytopes associated to finite posets, in [\textit{F. Ardila} et al., J. Combin. Theory Ser. A. 118, No. 8, 2454--2462 (2011; Zbl 1355.17006)], the authors introduced the notion of marked order and marked chain polytopes associated to marked posets. The toric varieties associated to these lattice polytopes have been also studied and linked to toric degenerations of flag varieties. In search for intermediate lattice polytopes in [\textit{X. Fang} et al., SIAM J. Discrete Math. 34, No. 1, 611--639 (2020; Zbl 1445.52009)], the authors introduced a family of lattice polytopes interpolating between marked order and marked chain polytopes. This family is parametrized by lattice points in a hypercube, and a vertex corresponds to a lattice polytope which is called a marked chain-order polytope. The goal of this article is to study the algebro-geometric properties of the toric varieties associated to marked chain-order polytopes. The first main result is a decomposition of a marked chain-order polytope into a Minkowski sum of building blocks corresponding to elementary markings of the poset. This decomposition provides an explicit set of generators of the semi-group algebra of the associated toric variety. The second main result characterizes reflexive polytopes among marked chain-order polytopes as those with underlying marked poset being ranked. As it is known, this in turn provides a characterization of Gorenstein-Fano toric varieties coming from marked chain-order polytopes.