Gelfand-Tsetlin polytopes and Feigin-Fourier-Littelmann polytopes as marked poset polytopes

Federico Ardila, Thomas Bliem, Dido Salazar

Published 2010-08-13Version 1

Stanley (1986) showed how a finite partially ordered set gives rise to two polytopes, called the order polytope and chain polytope, which have the same Ehrhart polynomial despite being quite different combinatorially. We generalize his result to a wider family of polytopes constructed from a poset P with integers assigned to some of its elements. Through this construction, we explain combinatorially the relationship between the Gelfand-Tsetlin polytopes (1950) and the Feigin-Fourier-Littelmann polytopes (2010), which arise in the representation theory of the special linear Lie algebra. We then use the generalized Gelfand-Tsetlin polytopes of Berenstein and Zelevinsky (1989) to propose conjectural analogues of the Feigin-Fourier-Littelmann polytopes corresponding to the symplectic and odd orthogonal Lie algebras.