Almost factorial many facets for 0/1-polytopes

Abstract

A long-standing question posed by Fukuda (1995) and Ziegler (2000) inquires about the asymptotic behavior of $g(n)$, the maximum number of facets that an $n$-dimensional $0/1$-polytope can have. A remarkable result by Bárány and Pór (2001) via probabilistic methods established that $g(n)$ is at least superexponential in $n$. In this paper, we propose a drastic change of perspective, which leads us to show that for each $n\geq 10$ there exists a $0/1$-polytope having at least $(n-\lceil 2\log_2 (n)\rceil - 1)!$ facets. This provides a significant improvement over the currently known lower bounds for $g(n)$. Furthermore, when combined with known upper bounds, our construction establishes the asymptotic behavior of $\log g(n)$ up to an error of $O((\log n)^2)$. The methods employed throughout this paper are elementary and fully deterministic. The underlying ideas in our proof stem from the combinatorics of hypersimplices and permutohedra.