Roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of hypersimplices

Abstract

The Ehrhart polynomial of the $d$-th hypersimplex $\Delta(d,n)$ of order $n$ is studied. By computational experiments and a known result for $d=2$, we conjecture that the real part of every roots of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\Delta(d,n)$ is negative and larger than $- \frac{n}{d}$ if $n \geq 2d$. In this paper, we show that the conjecture is true when $d=3$ and that every root $a$ of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\Delta(d,n)$ satisfies $-\frac{n}{d} < {\rm Re} (a) < 1$ if $4 \leq d \ll n$.