Spherical convex hull of random points on a wedge

Abstract

Consider two half-spaces $H_1^+$ and $H_2^+$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ whose bounding hyperplanes $H_1$ and $H_2$ are orthogonal and pass through the origin. The intersection $\mathbb{S}_{2,+}^d:=\mathbb{S}^d\cap H_1^+\cap H_2^+$ is a spherical convex subset of the $d$-dimensional unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$, which contains a great subsphere of dimension $d-2$ and is called a spherical wedge. Choose $n$ independent random points uniformly at random on $\mathbb{S}_{2,+}^d$ and consider the expected facet number of the spherical convex hull of these points. It is shown that, up to terms of lower order, this expectation grows like a constant multiple of $\log n$. A similar behaviour is obtained for the expected facet number of a homogeneous Poisson point process on $\mathbb{S}_{2,+}^d$. The result is compared to the corresponding behaviour of classical Euclidean random polytopes and of spherical random polytopes on a half-sphere.