Paper detail

Alexander Duality and Rational Associahedra

A recent pair of papers of Armstrong, Loehr, and Warrington and Armstrong, Williams, and the author initiated the systematic study of {\em rational Catalan combinatorics} which is a generalization of Fuss-Catalan combinatorics (which is in turn a generalization of classical Catalan combinatorics). The latter paper gave two possible models for a rational analog of the associahedron which attach simplicial complexes to any pair of coprime positive integers a < b. These complexes coincide up to the Fuss-Catalan level of generality, but in general one may be a strict subcomplex of the other. Verifying a conjecture of Armstrong, Williams, and the author, we prove that these complexes agree up to homotopy and, in fact, that one complex collapses onto the other. This reconciles the two competing models for rational associahedra. As a corollary, we get that the involution (a < b) \longleftrightarrow (b-a < b) on pairs of coprime positive integers manifests itself topologically as Alexander duality of rational associahedra. This collapsing and Alexander duality are new features of rational Catalan combinatorics which are invisible at the Fuss-Catalan level of generality.