Extending simplicial complexes: Topological and combinatorial properties

Abstract: Given an arbitrary hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, we may glue to $\mathcal{H}$ a family of hypergraphs to get a new hypergraph $\mathcal{H}'$ having $\mathcal{H}$ as an induced subhypergraph. In this paper, we introduce three gluing techniques for which the topological and combinatorial properties (such as Cohen-Macaulayness, shellability, vertex-decomposability etc.) of the resulting hypergraph $\mathcal{H}'$ is under control in terms of the glued components. This enables us to construct broad classes of simplicial complexes containing a given simplicial complex as induced subcomplex satisfying nice topological and combinatorial properties. Our results will be accompanied with some interesting open problems.