The facial weak order on hyperplane arrangements (Q5918455)

In this extended abstract the authors introduce and study the facial weak order of an essential real hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{A} \subset \mathbb{R}^{d}\). For such \(\mathcal{A}\) we denote by \(\mathcal{R}(\mathcal{A})\) the set of regions associated with \(\mathcal{A}\), i.e., these are closures of the connected componets of \(\mathbb{R}^{d} \setminus \bigcup_{H \in \mathcal{A}} H\), and by \(\mathcal{F}(\mathcal{A})\) the set of faces. For two regions \(R,R' \in \mathcal{R}(\mathcal{A})\) we denote by \(S(R,R')\) the set of hyperplanes of \(\mathcal{A}\) that separate \(R\) and \(R'\). Then we can define the poset of regions \(PR(\mathcal{A},B) = (\mathcal{R}(\mathcal{A}),\leq)\) with a fixed base region \(B\), namely for two regions \(R,R'\) we have that \(R \leq R'\) if and only if \(S(R) \subset S(R')\), where \(S(R):=S(B,R)\). One can show that for any face \(F \in \mathcal{F}(\mathcal{A})\) the set \(\{R \in \mathcal{R}(\mathcal{A}) 0 : F \subset R\}\) is an interval of the poset of regions \(PR(\mathcal{A},B)\), which is denoted by \([m_{F},M_{F}]\). Now the facial weak order \(FW(\mathcal{A},B)\) is defined for two faces \(F,G \in \mathcal{F}(\mathcal{A})\) with facial intervals \([m_{F},M_{F}]\) and \([m_{G},M_{G}]\) by \(F \leq_{F}G\) if and only if \(m_{F} \leq m_{G}\) and \(M_{F} \leq M_{G}\). The main result of the paper can be formulated as follows. Main Theorem. If \(PR(\mathcal{A},B)\) is a lattice, then \(FW(\mathcal{A},B)\) is a lattice. It is worth emphasizig that for a general arrangement \(\mathcal{A}\) the facial weak order \(FW(\mathcal{A},B)\) may not to be a lattice. Moreover, the authors provide four equivalent definitions for the facial weak order on a given hyperplane arrangement, namely \begin{itemize} \item[i)] in terms of separation set comparisons between the minimal and maximal regions incident to a face, \item[ii)] by providing a precise description of its covering relations, \item[iii)] in terms of covectors of the associated oriented matroid, \item[iv)] and in terms of root sets of the normals to the hyperplanes, closely related to the geometry of the zonotope. \end{itemize}