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Minkowski length of 3D lattice polytopes

We study the Minkowski length L(P) of a lattice polytope P, which is defined to be the largest number of non-trivial primitive segments whose Minkowski sum lies in P. The Minkowski length represents the largest possible number of factors in a factorization of polynomials with exponent vectors in P, and shows up in lower bounds for the minimum distance of toric codes. In this paper we give a polytime algorithm for computing L(P) where P is a 3D lattice polytope. We next study 3D lattice polytopes of Minkowski length 1. In particular, we show that if Q, a subpolytope of P, is the Minkowski sum of L = L(P) lattice polytopes Qi, each of Minkowski length 1, then the total number of interior lattice points of the polytopes Q1,..., QL is at most 4. Both results extend previously known results for lattice polygons. Our methods differ substantially from those used in the two-dimensional case.