Simplicial complexes with many facets are vertex decomposable

Anton Dochtermann, Ritika Nair, Jay Schweig, Adam Van Tuyl, Russ Woodroofe

Published 2024-03-12Version 1

Let $\Delta$ be a pure simplicial complex on $n$ vertices having dimension $d$ and codimension $c = n-d-1$ in the simplex. Terai and Yoshida proved that if the number of facets of $\Delta$ is at least $\binom{n}{c}-2c+1$, then $\Delta$ is Cohen-Macaulay. We improve this result by showing that these hypotheses imply the stronger condition that $\Delta$ is vertex decomposable. We give examples to show that this bound is optimal, and that the conclusion cannot be strengthened to the class of matroids or shifted complexes. We explore an application to Simon's Conjecture and discuss connections to other results from the literature.