Discrete Comput Geom (2008) 40: 365–376 DOI 10.1007/s00454-007-9002-5 Ehrhart Series and Lattice Triangulations Sam Payne Received: 13 February 2007 / Revised: 11 May 2007 / Published online: 18 September 2007 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract We express the generating function for lattice points in a rational poly- hedral cone with a simplicial subdivision in terms of multivariate analogues of the h-polynomials of the subdivision and “local contributions” of the links of its nonuni- modular faces. We also compute new examples of nonunimodal h∗-vectors of reflex- ive polytopes. 1Introduction Let N be a lattice and let σ be a strongly convex rational polyhedral cone in N R = N R.Thegeneratingfunctionforlatticepointsinσ , ⊗Z v Gσ x , = v (σ N) ∈!∩ is a rational function, in the quotient field Q(N) of the multivariate Laurent polyno- mial ring Z N .Forinstance,ifσ is unimodular, spanned by a subset v1,...,vr of [ ] v v { } abasisforN,thenGσ is equal to 1/(1 x 1 ) (1 x r ). − ··· − Suppose " is a rational simplicial subdivision of σ ,withv1,...,vs the primi- tive generators of the rays of ".WedefineamultivariateanalogueH" of the h- dim τ dim σ dim τ polynomial h"(t) τ " t (1 t) − ,by = ∈ · − " vi vj H" x (1 x ) . = · − τ " # vi τ vj τ % !∈ $∈ $&∈ Supported by the Clay Mathematics Institute. S. Payne (!) Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, Bldg. 380, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA e-mail:
[email protected] 366 Discrete Comput Geom (2008) 40: 365–376 Every point in σ is in the relative interior of a unique cone in " and can be written uniquely as a nonnegative integer linear combination of the primitive generators of the rays of that cone plus a fractional part.