Do alcoved lattice polytopes have unimodal h*-vector?

Abstract

We show that h*-vectors of alcoved polytopes P in R^n (of Lie type A) are unimodal if they contain interior lattice points and their facets have lattice distance 1 to the set of interior lattice points. The maximal possible such distance for general alcoved polytopes is shown to be dim(P)-1. A secondary purpose of the paper is to serve as a guide to previous work surrounding unimodality of h*-vectors of alcoved polytopes and related questions.