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SHAPES OF POLYHEDRA, MIXED VOLUMES AND HYPERBOLIC GEOMETRY

Part of: Low-dimensional topology Polytopes and polyhedra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2016

François Fillastre  and
Ivan Izmestiev
François Fillastre
Affiliation:
Departement of Mathematics, University of Cergy-Pontoise, UMR CNRS 8088, F-95000 Cergy-Pontoise, France email francois.fillastre@u-cergy.fr
Ivan Izmestiev
Affiliation:
Institut für Mathematik, Freie Universität Berlin, Arnimallee 2, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Department of Mathematics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 23, CH-1700 Fribourg Pérolles, Switzerland email ivan.izmestiev@unifr.ch
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Abstract

We generalize to higher dimensions the Bavard–Ghys construction of the hyperbolic metric on the space of polygons with fixed directions of edges. The space of convex $d$-dimensional polyhedra with fixed directions of facet normals has a decomposition into type cones that correspond to different combinatorial types of polyhedra. This decomposition is a subfan of the secondary fan of a vector configuration and can be analyzed with the help of Gale diagrams. We construct a family of quadratic forms on each of the type cones using the theory of mixed volumes. The Alexandrov–Fenchel inequalities ensure that these forms have exactly one positive eigenvalue. This introduces a piecewise hyperbolic structure on the space of similarity classes of polyhedra with fixed directions of facet normals. We show that some of the dihedral angles on the boundary of the resulting cone-manifold are equal to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}/2$.

MSC classification

Primary: 52B11: $n$-dimensional polytopes
Secondary: 52B35: Gale and other diagrams 57M50: Geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds
Type
Research Article
Information
Mathematika , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , 2017 , pp. 124 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © University College London 2016 

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