Unit and proper tube orders (Q953272)

This note continues the exploration of ``tube orders'', a generalization of interval orders and of trapezoidal orders introduced in [\textit{J. D. Laison}, ``Tube representations of ordered sets'', Order 21, No.~3, 207--230 (2004; Zbl 1076.06004)]. A tube of dimension \(n\) is formed by taking lines \(B_1, \dots, B_n\) in \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space parallel to the first Cartesian axis; one represents a poset \(P\) by: First choosing for each \(x \in P\) an assignment of line segments, one from each line, and obtaining the convex hull \(p_x\) of those line segments. Second, for any \(x, y \in P\), we set \(x < y\) in \(P\) iff \(p_x\) wholly precedes \(p_y\) in the tube in the direction of the first Cartesian axis, i.e., if \(p_x\) does not intersect \(p_y\) and the first coordinate of any point in \(p_x\) is less than the first coordinate of any point in \(p_y\). If \(n = 1\), this is a representation of interval orderings; if \(n = 2\), of trapezoidal orderings. Thus tube orders could be regarded as polytope orderings of arbitrary dimension. Two restrictions are explored: 1. A proper tube ordering has none of the polytopes in the tube being a subset of another. 2. A unit tube ordering has every polytope being of volume \(1\). Proper and unit interval and trapezoidal orders have already been studied, and the purpose of this note is to consider the case where \(n > 2\). The results are: If \(n > 2\), then the set of posets that can be represented as \(n\)-dimensional unit tube orderings is a proper subset of the set of posets that can be represented as \(n\)-dimensional proper tube orderings, which in turn is a proper subset of the set of posets that can be represented as \(n\)-dimensional tube orderings.