Monotone Paths on Cross-Polytopes

Abstract: In the early 1990's, Billera and Sturmfels introduced the monotone path polytope (MPP), a special case of the general theory of fiber polytopes that associates a polytope to a pair $(P,\varphi)$ of a polytope $P$ and linear functional $\varphi$. In that same paper, they showed that MPPs of simplices and hyper-cubes are combinatorial cubes and permutahedra respectively. Their work has lead to many developments in combinatorics. Here we investigate the monotone paths for generic orientations of cross-polytopes. We show the face lattice of its MPP is isomorphic to the lattice of intervals in the sign poset from oriented matroid theory. We look at its $f$-vector, its realizations, and facets.