Root polytopes, parking functions, and the HOMFLY polynomial (Q2360090)

A special alternating knot is a knot with an alternating diagram where one of the checkerboard surfaces of the diagram is orientable. Such a knot diagram yields a plane bipartite checkerboard graph \(G\). \textit{A. Postnikov} [Int. Math. Res. Not. 2009, No. 6, 1026--1106 (2009; Zbl 1162.52007)] associates a root polytope \(\mathcal{Q}_G\) to \(G\). In this article, the authors build a triangulation of the root polytope \(\mathcal{Q}_G\) which comes from certain spanning trees of the graph \(G\). The \(h\)-vector of the triangulation is a polynomial that keeps track of how many simplices of each dimension are in the triangulation. The main theorem of the article relates the \(h\)-vector of this triangulation of the root polytope of a special alternating link \(L\) to the coefficient of the maximal \(z\)-degree term in the HOMFLY-PT polynomial of \(L\). An alternate formulation of this coefficient in terms of parking functions (see [\textit{A. Postnikov} and \textit{B. Shapiro}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 356, No. 8, 3109--3142 (2004; Zbl 1043.05038)]) of one of the checkerboard graphs is also given.