Chainlink Polytopes and Ehrhart Equivalence

Abstract

We introduce a class of polytopes that we call chainlink polytopes and show that they allow us to construct infinite families of pairs of non-isomorphic rational polytopes with the same Ehrhart quasipolynomial. Our construction is based on circular fence posets, a recently introduced class of posets, which admit a non-obvious and nontrivial symmetry in their rank sequences. We show that this symmetry can be lifted to the level of polyhedral models (which we call chainlink polytopes) for these posets. Along the way, we introduce the related class of chainlink posets and show that they exhibit analogous nontrivial symmetry properties. We further prove an outstanding conjecture on the unimodality of rank polynomials of circular fence posets.