Shellable tilings on relative simplicial complexes and their \(h\)-vectors (Q6168278)

Shellability represents a classical and important property of finite simplicial complexes. It is a quite strong property: a shellable closed triangulated manifold has to be piecewise-linear and homeomorphic to a sphere, yet many triangulated spheres are not shellable even in dimension three. However piecewise-linear spheres become shellable after finitely many barycentric subdivisions. The shellability condition has been relaxed in several ways, such as collapsibility, a combinatorial counterpart to contractibility, constructibility, local constructibility and partitionability. Unfortunately, all these properties remain rather constrictive with respect to the underlying topology of the complex. Continuing his recent introduction in [\textit{N. Salepci} and \textit{J.-Y. Welschinger}, ``Tilings, packings and expected Betti numbers in simplicial complexes'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1806.05084}] of a geometric counterpart to partitionability, the author defines an \(h\)-\textit{tiling} on a finite simplicial complex to be a partition of its geometric realization by maximal simplices deprived of several codimension one faces together with possibly their remaining face of highest codimension. He proves the existence of \(h\)-tilings on every finite simplicial complex after finitely many stellar subdivisions at maximal simplices. Furthermore, these tilings are moreover shellable. Moreover, the number of tiles of each type used by a tiling, encoded by a corresponding \(h\)-\textit{vector}, is determined by the number of \textit{critical tiles} of each index it uses, encoded by its so \textit{called critical vector}. In the case of closed triangulated manifolds, these vectors also satisfy some palindromic property. The behavior of tilings under any stellar subdivision is also investigated.