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Flag arrangements and triangulations of products of simplices

Federico Ardila·Sara Billey
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Abstract

We investigate the line arrangement that results from intersecting d complete flags in C^n. We give a combinatorial description of the matroid T_{n,d} that keeps track of the linear dependence relations among these lines. We prove that the bases of the matroid T_{n,3} characterize the triangles with holes which can be tiled with unit rhombi. More generally, we provide evidence for a conjectural connection between the matroid T_{n,d}, the triangulations of the product of simplices Delta_{n-1} x Δ_{d-1}, and the arrangements of d tropical hyperplanes in tropical (n-1)-space. Our work provides a simple and effective criterion to ensure the vanishing of many Schubert structure constants in the flag manifold, and a new perspective on Billey and Vakil's method for computing the non-vanishing ones.

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Federico Ardila, Sara Billey. 2006-05-22. Flag arrangements and triangulations of products of simplices. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0605598

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