Stellahedral Geometry of Partially Ordered Sets

Abstract

We introduce a transformation on partially ordered sets, termed the \emph{stellahedral transform}, with notable features. It preserves the properties of being Eulerian, Cohen--Macaulay, and of being the face poset of a polytope. Furthermore, it admits an explicit geometric realization for convex polytopes and specializes to the construction that takes a simplex to the stellahedron. One motivation for this definition comes from the theory of toric $h$-polynomials and (augmented) Chow polynomials of Eulerian posets. We show that the right augmented Chow polynomial of an Eulerian poset $P$ agrees with the toric $h$-polynomial of the stellahedral transform of $P$. We use this perspective, together with $\mathbf{cd}$-index results due to Ehrenborg (2005) and Karu (2006), to prove two positivity results for augmented Chow polynomials: for Gorenstein* posets they are unimodal, and for face posets of polytopes they are $γ$-positive. Along the way we provide negative answers to two open questions concerning Eulerian and Gorenstein* posets. First, the question on the nonnegativity of Eulerian Chow polynomials, posed by Ferroni, Matherne, and Vecchi (2024). Second, the question posed by Athanasiadis and Kalampogia-Evangelinou (2023) on the real-rootedness of chain and Chow polynomials of Gorenstein* posets: these examples provide a novel application of a technique introduced by Murai and Nevo (2014).