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Abstract
The associahedron is a polytope whose graph is the graph of flips on
triangulations of a convex polygon. Pseudotriangulations and
multitriangulations generalize triangulations in two different ways, which have
been unified by Pilaud and Pocchiola in their study of flip graphs on
pseudoline arrangements with contacts supported by a given sorting network.
In this paper, we construct the brick polytope of a sorting network, obtained
as the convex hull of the brick vectors associated to each pseudoline
arrangement supported by the network. We combinatorially characterize the
vertices of this polytope, describe its faces, and decompose it as a Minkowski
sum of matroid polytopes.
Our brick polytopes include Hohlweg and Lange's many realizations of the
associahedron, which arise as brick polytopes for certain well-chosen sorting
networks. We furthermore discuss the brick polytopes of sorting networks
supporting pseudoline arrangements which correspond to multitriangulations of
convex polygons: our polytopes only realize subgraphs of the flip graphs on
multitriangulations and they cannot appear as projections of a hypothetical
multiassociahedron.