Stellahedral geometry of matroids

Abstract

We use the geometry of the stellahedral toric variety to study matroids. We identify the valuative group of matroids with the cohomology ring of the stellahedral toric variety, and show that valuative, homological, and numerical equivalence relations for matroids coincide. We establish a new log-concavity result for the Tutte polynomial of a matroid, answering a question of Wagner and Shapiro-Smirnov-Vaintrob on Postnikov-Shapiro algebras, and calculate the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of matroid Schubert cells. The central construction is the "augmented tautological classes of matroids," modeled after certain vector bundles on the stellahedral toric variety.