On Smooth Combinatorial Products of Simplices

Abstract

We show that every lattice weak Minkowski summand of a smooth polytope combinatorially isomorphic to a product of simplices has a quadratic triangulation. This is achieved by identifying this class of polytopes with the class of Nakajima polytopes. We combine these results to give a new proof that two lattice weak Minkowski summands of the same such smooth polytope are relatively IDP. Along the way, we prove a structure theorem for simple polytopes whose 2-faces are triangles and trapezoids.