Saturated simplicial complexes

Abstract

Among shellable complexes a certain class has maximal modular homology, and these are the socalled saturated complexes. We extend the notion of saturation to arbitrary pure complexes and give a survey of their properties. It is shown that saturated complexes can be characterized via the p-rank of incidence matrices and via the structure of links. We show that rank-selected subcomplexes of saturated complexes are also saturated, and that order complexes of geometric lattices are saturated.