PALP: A Package for Analyzing Lattice Polytopes with Applications to Toric Geometry

Kreuzer and Skarke famously produced the largest known database of Calabi-Yau threefolds by providing a complete construction of all 473,800,776 reflexive polyhedra that exist in four dimensions. These polyhedra describe the singular limits of ambient toric varieties in which Calabi-Yau threefolds can exist as hypersurfaces. In this paper, we review how to extract topological and geometric information about Calabi-Yau threefolds using the toric construction, and we provide, i...

We give an algorithm that constructs the Hasse diagram of the face lattice of a convex polytope P from its vertex-facet incidences in time O(min{n,m}*a*f), where n is the number of vertices, m is the number of facets, a is the number of vertex-facet incidences, and f is the total number of faces of P. This improves results of Fukuda and Rosta (1994), who described an algorithm for enumerating all faces of a d-polytope in O(min{n,m}*d*f^2) steps. For simple or simplicial d-pol...

This paper defines, for each convex polytope $\Delta$, a family $H_w\Delta$ of vector spaces. The definition uses a combination of linear algebra and combinatorics. When what is called exact calculation holds, the dimension $h_w\Delta$ of $H_w\Delta$ is a linear function of the flag vector $f\Delta$. It is expected that the $H_w\Delta$ are examples, for toric varieties, of the new topological invariants introduced by the author in "Local-global intersection homolog" (preprint...

We prove that, for fixed n there exist only finitely many embeddings of Q-factorial toric varieties X into P^n that are induced by a complete linear system. The proof is based on a combinatorial result that for fixed nonnegative integers d and n, there are only finitely many smooth d-polytopes with n lattice points. We also enumerate all smooth 3-polytopes with at most 12 lattice points. In fact, it is sufficient to bound the singularities and the number of lattice points on ...

A general problem in complex cobordism theory is to find useful representatives for cobordism classes. One particularly convenient class of complex manifolds consists of smooth projective toric varieties. The bijective correspondence between these varieties and smooth polytopes allows us to examine which complex cobordism classes contain a smooth projective toric variety by studying the combinatorics of polytopes. These combinatorial properties determine obstructions to a com...

In this paper we report on the full classification of Dirichlet-Voronoi polyhedra and Delaunay subdivisions of five-dimensional translational lattices. We obtain a complete list of $110244$ affine types (L-types) of Delaunay subdivisions and it turns out that they are all combinatorially inequivalent, giving the same number of combinatorial types of Dirichlet-Voronoi polyhedra. Using a refinement of corresponding secondary cones, we obtain $181394$ contraction types. We repor...

A well known result by Lagarias and Ziegler states that there are finitely many equivalence classes of d-dimensional lattice polytopes having volume at most K, for fixed constants d and K. We describe an algorithm for the complete enumeration of such equivalence classes for arbitrary constants d and K. The algorithm, which gives another proof of the finiteness result, is implemented for small values of K, up to dimension six. The resulting database contains and extends severa...

The polymake software system deals with convex polytopes and related objects from geometric combinatorics. This note reports on a new implementation of a subclass for lattice polytopes. The features displayed are enabled by recent changes to the polymake core, which will be discussed briefly.

Even a cursory inspection of the Hodge plot associated with Calabi-Yau threefolds that are hypersurfaces in toric varieties reveals striking structures. These patterns correspond to webs of elliptic-K3 fibrations whose mirror images are also elliptic-K3 fibrations. Such manifolds arise from reflexive polytopes that can be cut into two parts along slices corresponding to the K3 fibers. Any two half-polytopes over a given slice can be combined into a reflexive polytope. This fa...

In this expository note, we review the standard formulation of mirror symmetry for Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties, and compare this construction to a description of mirror symmetry for K3 surfaces which relies on a sublattice of the Picard lattice. We then show how to combine information about the Picard group of a toric ambient space with data about automorphisms of the toric variety to identify families of K3 surfaces with high Picard rank.