Flow polytopes of partitions

Abstract

Recent progress on flow polytopes indicates many interesting families with product formulas for their volume. These product formulas are all proved using analytic techniques. Our work breaks from this pattern. We define a family of closely related flow polytopes $\mathcal{F}_{(λ, {\bf a})}$ for each partition shape $λ$ and netflow vector ${\bf a}\in \mathbb{Z}^n_{> 0}$. In each such family, we prove that there is a polytope (the limiting one in a sense) which is a product of scaled simplices, explaining their product volumes. We also show that the combinatorial type of all polytopes in a fixed family $\mathcal{F}_{(λ, {\bf a})}$ is the same. When $λ$ is a staircase shape and ${\bf a}$ is the all ones vector the latter result specializes to a theorem of the first author with Morales and Rhoades, which shows that the combinatorial type of the Tesler polytope is a product of simplices.