Refined Ehrhart series and bigraded rings

Abstract

We study a natural set of refinements of the Ehrhart series of a closed polytope, first considered by Chapoton. We compute the refined series in full generality for a simplex of dimension d, a cross-polytope of dimension d, respectively a hypercube of dimension d<4, using commutative algebra. We deduce summation formulae for products of q-integers with different arguments, generalizing a classical identity due to MacMahon and Carlitz. We also present a characterisation of a certain refined Eulerian polynomial in algebraic terms.