Article Morphisms and Order Ideals of Toric Posets Matthew Macauley Department of Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0975, USA;
[email protected]; Tel.: +1-864-656-1838 Academic Editor: Michael Falk Received: 1 January 2015; Accepted: 25 May 2016; Published: 4 June 2016 Abstract: Toric posets are in some sense a natural “cyclic” version of finite posets in that they capture the fundamental features of a partial order but without the notion of minimal or maximal elements. They can be thought of combinatorially as equivalence classes of acyclic orientations under the equivalence relation generated by converting sources into sinks, or geometrically as chambers of toric graphic hyperplane arrangements. In this paper, we define toric intervals and toric order-preserving maps, which lead to toric analogues of poset morphisms and order ideals. We develop this theory, discuss some fundamental differences between the toric and ordinary cases, and outline some areas for future research. Additionally, we provide a connection to cyclic reducibility and conjugacy in Coxeter groups. Keywords: Coxeter group; cyclic order; cyclic reducibility; morphism; partial order; preposet; order ideal; order-preserving map; toric hyperplane arrangement; toric poset MSC: 06A06, 52C35 1. Introduction A finite poset can be described by at least one directed acyclic graph where the elements are vertices and directed edges encode relations. We say “at least one” because edges implied by transitivity may be present or absent. The operation of converting a source vertex into a sink generates an equivalence relation on finite posets over a fixed graph. Equivalence classes are called toric posets. These objects have arisen in a variety of contexts in the literature, including but not limited to chip-firing games [1], Coxeter groups [2–4], graph polynomials [5], lattices [6,7], and quiver representations [8].