The higher Stasheff–Tamari orders in representation theory

Abstract

We show that the relationship discovered by Oppermann and Thomas between triangulations of cyclic polytopes and the higher Auslander algebras of type $A$, denoted $A_n^d$, is an incredibly rich one. The \emph{higher Stasheff–Tamari orders} are two orders on triangulations of cyclic polytopes, defined in the 1990s by Kapranov and Voevodsky, and Edelman and Reiner, who conjectured them to be equivalent. We first show that these orders correspond in even dimensions to natural orders on tilting modules defined by Riedtmann and Schofield and studied by Happel and Unger. This result allows us to show that triangulations of odd-dimensional cyclic polytopes are in bijection with equivalence classes of $d$-maximal green sequences of $A_n^d$, which we introduce as a higher-dimensional generalisation of the original maximal green sequences of Keller. We further interpret the higher Stasheff–Tamari orders in odd dimensions, where they correspond to natural orders on equivalences classes of $d$-maximal green sequences. The conjecture that these two partial orders on equivalence classes of $d$-maximal green sequences are equal amounts to an oriented version of the “no-gap” conjecture of Brüstle, Dupont, and Perotin. A corollary of our results is that this conjecture holds for $A_n$, and that here the set of equivalence classes of (1-)maximal green sequences is a lattice.