Families of lattice polytopes of mixed degree one (Q2306001)

A lattice polytope in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) is the convex hull of points in \(\mathbb{Z}^n\), called lattice points. A lattice polytope is hollow if it contains no lattice points in its (relative) interior. Given a family \(P_1,\dots,P_n\) of \(n\)-dimensional polytopes in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), Soprunov showed that the number of interior lattice points of their Minkowski sum \(P_1 + \cdots + P_n\) is bounded below by \(\mathrm{MV}(P_1,\dots,P_n) -1\), where \(\mathrm{MV}\) denotes the mixed volume and where equality occurs if only if the Minkowski sum of any \(n-1\) of the polytopes is hollow. When equality holds, the family \(P_1,\dots,P_n\) is said to have mixed degree at most \(1\); this article focuses on families whose mixed degree is exactly \(1\) with the ultimate goal of finding a characterization of all such families. The authors show that in all dimensions \(n \geq 4\), each polytope in a family of \(n\) lattice polytopes of mixed degree \(1\) projects to the standard \((n-1)\)-simplex by a lattice projection (although there are a finite number of exceptions to this). Their result does not extend to dimensions \(2\) or \(3\), but they do identify the cases in which this does not hold. In dimension \(2\), the list of exceptions is infinite, while in dimension \(3\), only one case of exceptions results in an infinite class.