Extended Nestohedra and their Face Numbers

Nestohedra are a family of convex polytopes that includes permutohedra, associahedra, and graph associahedra. In this paper, we study an extension of such polytopes, called extended nestohedra. We show that these objects are indeed the boundaries of simple polytopes, answering a question of Lam and Pylyavskyy. We also study the duals of (extended) nestohedra, giving a complete characterization of isomorphisms (as simplicial complexes) between the duals of extended nestohedra and a partial characterization of isomorphisms between the duals of nestohedra and extended nestohedra. In addition, we give formulas for their $f$-, $h$-, and $\gamma$-vectors. This includes showing that the $f$-vectors of the extended nestohedron corresponding to a forest $F$ and the nestohedron corresponding to the line graph of $F$ are the same, as well as showing that all flag extended nestohedra have nonnegative $\gamma$-vectors, thus proving Gal's conjecture for a large class of flag simple polytopes. We also relate the $f$- and $h$-vectors of the nestohedra and extended nestohedra, as well as give explicit formulas for the $h$- and $\gamma$-vectors in terms of descent statistics for a certain class of flag extended nestohedra. Finally, we define a partial ordering that is a lattice quotient of the weak Bruhat order on the symmetric group, and show that any linear extension of this poset gives a shelling of the stellohedron.