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Dissections, Hom-complexes and the Cayley trick

Julian Pfeifle
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Abstract

We show that certain canonical realizations of the complexes Hom(G,H) and Hom_+(G,H) of (partial) graph homomorphisms studied by Babson and Kozlov are in fact instances of the polyhedral Cayley trick. For G a complete graph, we then characterize when a canonical projection of these complexes is itself again a complex, and exhibit several well-known objects that arise as cells or subcomplexes of such projected Hom-complexes: the dissections of a convex polygon into k-gons, Postnikov's generalized permutohedra, staircase triangulations, the complex dual to the lower faces of a cyclic polytope, and the graph of weak compositions of an integer into a fixed number of summands.

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Julian Pfeifle. 2006-06-27. Dissections, Hom-complexes and the Cayley trick. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0512529

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