Ehrhart positivity of Tesler polytopes and Berline-Vergne's valuation

Abstract: For $\ba \in \R_{\geq 0}^{n}$, the Tesler polytope $\tes_{n}(\ba)$ is the set of upper triangular matrices with non-negative entries whose hook sum vector is $\ba$. Motivated by a conjecture of Morales', we study the questions of whether the coefficients of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\tes_n(1,1,\dots,1)$ are positive. We attack this problem by studying a certain function constructed by Berline-Vergne and its values on faces of a unimodularly equivalent copy of $\tes_n(1,1,\dots,1).$ We develop a method of obtaining the dot products appeared in formulas for computing Berline-Vergne's function directly from facet normal vectors. Using this method together with known formulas, we are able to show Berline-Vergne's function has positive values on codimension $2$ and $3$ faces of the polytopes we consider. As a consequence, we prove that the $3$rd and $4$th coefficients of the Ehrhart polynomial of $\tes_{n}(1,\dots,1)$ are positive. Using the Reduction Theorem by Castillo and the second author, we generalize the above result to all deformations of $\tes_{n}(1,\dots,1)$ including all the integral Tesler polytopes.