Inner tube formulas for polytopes

Abstract

We show that the volume of the inner $r$-neighborhood of a polytope in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space is a pluri-phase Steiner-like function, i.e. a continuous piecewise polynomial function of degree $d$, proving thus a conjecture of Lapidus and Pearse. In the case when the polytope is dimension-wise equiangular we determine the coefficients of the initial polynomial as functions of the dihedral angles and the skeletal volumes of the polytope. We discuss also the degree of differentiability of this function and give a lower bound in terms of the set of normal vectors of the hyperplanes defining the polytope. We give also sufficient conditions for the highest differentiability degree to be attained.