The Dressian and the tropical Grassmannian parameterize abstract and realizable tropical linear spaces; but in general, the Dressian is much larger than the tropical Grassmannian. There are natural positive notions of both of these spaces -- the positive Dressian, and the positive tropical Grassmannian (which we introduced roughly fifteen years ago) -- so it is natural to ask how these two positive spaces compare. In this paper we show that the positive Dressian equals the positive tropical Grassmannian. Using the connection between the positive Dressian and regular positroidal subdivisions of the hypersimplex, we use our result to give a new "tropical" proof of da Silva's 1987 conjecture (first proved in 2017 by Ardila-Rincon-Williams) that all positively oriented matroids are realizable. We also show that the finest regular positroidal subdivisions of the hypersimplex consist of series-parallel matroid polytopes, and achieve equality in Speyer's f-vector theorem. Finally we give an example of a positroidal subdivision of the hypersimplex which is not regular, and make a connection to the theory of tropical hyperplane arrangements.
The Dressian Dr(k,n) parametrizes all tropical linear spaces, and it carries a natural fan structure as a subfan of the secondaryfan of the hypersimplex Δ(k,n). We explore the combinatorics of the rays of Dr(k,n), that is, the most degenerate tropical planes, for arbitrary k and n. This is related to a new rigidity concept for configurations of n-k points in the tropical (k-1)-torus. Additional conditions are given for k=3. On the way, we compute the entire fan Dr(3,8).
In this paper, we develop a tropical analog of the classical flag variety that we call the flag Dressian. We find relations, which we call "tropical incidence relations", for when one tropical linear space is contained in another, and show that the flag Dressian is a tropical prevariety. In the case of 2-step flag Dressians, which we call "tropical incidence prevarieties", we find an equivalence between points in this space and induced subdivisions of a hypersimplex, generalizing two parts of an equivalence given by D. Speyer for tropical linear spaces. We attempt to generalize the third part …
We study the totally non-negative part of the complete flag variety and of its tropicalization. We start by showing that Lusztig's notion of non-negative complete flag variety coincides with the flags in the complete flag variety which have non-negative Plücker coordinates. This mirrors the characterization of the totally non-negative Grassmannian as those points in the Grassmannian with all non-negative Plücker coordinates. We then study the tropical complete flag variety and complete flag Dressian, which are two tropical versions of the complete flag variety, capturing realizable and abstrac…
We study positivity notions for the tropicalization of type A flag varieties and the flag Dressian. We focus on the hollow case, where we have one constituent of rank 1 and another of corank 1. We characterize the three different notions that exist for this case in terms of Plücker coordinates. These notions are the tropicalization of the totally non-negative flag variety, Bruhat subdivisions and the non-negative flag Dressian. We show the first example where the first two concepts above do not coincide. In this case the non-negative flag Dressian equals the tropicalization of the Plücker non-…
Flag matroids are combinatorial abstractions of flags of linear subspaces, just as matroids are of linear subspaces. We introduce the flag Dressian as a tropical analogue of the partial flag variety, and prove a correspondence between: (a) points on the flag Dressian, (b) valuated flag matroids, (c) flags of projective tropical linear spaces, and (d) coherent flag matroidal subdivisions. We introduce and characterize projective tropical linear spaces, which serve as a fundamental tool in our proof. We apply the correspondence to prove that all valuated flag matroids on ground set up to size 5 …
We study valuated matroids, their tropical incidence relations, flag matroids and total positivity. This leads to a characterization of permutahedral subdivisions, namely subdivisions of regular permutahedra into generalized permutahedra. Further, we get a characterization of those subdivisions arising from positive valuated flag matroids.
The tropical Grassmannian parameterizes tropicalizations of linear spaces, while the Dressian parameterizes all planes in $\TP^{n-1}$. We study these parameter spaces and we compute them explicitly for $n \leq 7$. Planes are identified with matroid subdivisions and with arrangements of trees. These representations are used to draw pictures.
In tropical algebraic geometry, the solution sets of polynomial equations are piecewise-linear. We introduce the tropical variety of a polynomial ideal, and we identify it with a polyhedral subcomplex of the Grobner fan. The tropical Grassmannian arises in this manner from the ideal of quadratic Plucker relations. It is shown to parametrize all tropical linear spaces. Lines in tropical projective space are trees, and their tropical Grassmannian G_{2,n} equals the space of phylogenetic trees studied by Billera, Holmes and Vogtmann. Higher Grassmannians offer a natural generalization of the spac…
In this paper we study tropicalization of Grassmannian and linear varieties. In particular, we study the tropical linear spaces cor- responding to the phylogenetic trees. We prove that corresponding to each subtree of the phylogenetic tree there is a point on the tropical grassmannian. We deduce a necessary and sufficient condition for it to be on the facet of the tropical linear space.
In this short writing we prove that the set of m-dissimilarity vectors of n-trees is contained in the (m,n)-tropical Grassmannian, answering a question of Pachter and Speyer. We do this by proving a generalization of an equivalent conjecture proposed by Cools.
In this article, we will prove that the set of 4-dissimilarity vectors of n-trees is contained in the tropical Grassmannian G_{4,n}. We will also propose three equivalent conjectures related to the set of m-dissimilarity vectors of n-trees for the case m > 4. Using a computer algebra system, we can prove these conjectures for m = 5.
In this article, we present a massively parallel framework for computing tropicalizations of algebraic varieties which can make use of finite symmetries. We compute the tropical Grassmannian TGr$_0(3,8)$, and show that it refines the $15$-dimensional skeleton of the Dressian Dr$(3,8)$ with the exception of $23$ special cones for which we construct explicit obstructions to the realizability of their tropical linear spaces. Moreover, we propose algorithms for identifying maximal-dimensional tropical cones which belong to the positive tropicalization. These algorithms exploit symmetries of the tr…
Tropical algebraic geometry is the geometry of the tropical semiring (R, min, +). The theory of total positivity is a natural generalization of the study of matrices with all minors positive. In this paper we introduce the totally positive part of the tropicalization of an arbitrary affine variety, an object which has the structure of a polyhedral fan. We then investigate the case of the Grassmannian, denoting the resulting fan \Trop^+ Gr_{k,n}. We show that \Trop^+ Gr_{2,n} is the Stanley-Pitman fan, which is combinatorially the fan dual to the (type A_{n-3}) associahedron, and that \Trop^+ G…
Tropical geometry and the theory of Newton-Okounkov bodies are two methods which produce toric degenerations of an irreducible complex projective variety. Kaveh-Manon showed that the two are related. We give geometric maps between the Newton-Okounkov bodies corresponding to two adjacent maximal-dimensional prime cones in the tropicalization of $X$. Under a technical condition, we produce a natural "algebraic wall-crossing" map on the underlying value semigroups (of the corresponding valuations). In the case of the tropical Grassmannian $Gr(2,m)$, we prove that the algebraic wall-crossing map i…
In analogy with the origin of the additive structure of $K$-theory, we construct an $E_\infty$ structure on the matroid Grassmannian (the space of oriented matroids) for which the underlying binary operation is the direct sum of matroids. The proof involves lifting the polyhedral fan structure of the Dressian to a polyhedral model for the matroid Grassmannian, and introducing a novel $E_\infty$ operad made from the space of infinite subsets of $\mathbb{N}$.
We show that the number of combinatorial types of clusters of type $D_4$ modulo reflection-rotation is exactly equal to the number of combinatorial types of tropical planes in $\mathbb{TP}^5$. This follows from a result of Sturmfels and Speyer which classifies these tropical planes into seven combinatorial classes using a detailed study of the tropical Grassmannian $\operatorname{Gr}(3,6)$. Speyer and Williams show that the positive part $\operatorname{Gr}^+(3,6)$ of this tropical Grassmannian is combinatorially equivalent to a small coarsening of the cluster fan of type $D_4$. We provide a st…
In 2004 Pachter and Speyer introduced the higher dissimilarity maps for phylogenetic trees and asked two important questions about their relation to the tropical Grassmannian. Multiple authors, using independent methods, answered affirmatively the first of these questions, showing that dissimilarity vectors lie on the tropical Grassmannian, but the second question, whether the set of dissimilarity vectors forms a tropical subvariety, remained opened. We resolve this question by showing that the tropical balancing condition fails. However, by replacing the definition of the dissimilarity map wi…
We launch the study of the tropicalization of the symplectic Grassmannian, that is, the space of all linear subspaces that are isotropic with respect to a fixed symplectic form. We formulate tropical analogues of several equivalent characterizations of the symplectic Grassmannian and determine all implications between them. In the process, we show that the Plücker and symplectic relations form a tropical basis if and only if the rank is at most 2. We provide plenty of examples that show that several features of the symplectic Grassmannian do not hold after tropicalizing. We show exactly when d…
Mustafin varieties are flat degenerations of projective spaces, induced by a choice of an $n-$tuple of lattices in a vector space over a non-archimedean field. They were introduced by Mustafin in the 70s in order to generalise Mumford's groundbreaking work on the unformisation of curves to higher dimension. These varieties have a rich combinatorial structure as can be seen in pioneering work of Cartwright, Häbich, Sturmfels and Werner. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to Mustafin varieties in terms of images of rational maps, which were studied by Li. Applying tropical intersection t…
We define and study the totally nonnegative part of the Chow quotient of the Grassmannian, or more simply the nonnegative configuration space. This space has a natural stratification by positive Chow cells, and we show that nonnegative configuration space is homeomorphic to a polytope as a stratified space. We establish bijections between positive Chow cells and the following sets: (a) regular subdivisions of the hypersimplex into positroid polytopes, (b) the set of cones in the positive tropical Grassmannian, and (c) the set of cones in the positive Dressian. Our work is motivated by connecti…
In this paper, we continue our study of blade arrangements and the positroidal subdivisions which are induced by them on $Δ_{k,n}$. A blade is a tropical hypersurface which is generated by a system of $n$ affine simple roots of type $SL_n$ that enjoys a cyclic symmetry. When placed at the center of a simplex, a blade induces a decomposition into $n$ maximal cells which are known as Pitman-Stanley polytopes. We introduce a complex $(B_{k,n},\partial)$ of weighted blade arrangements and we prove that the positive tropical Grassmannian surjects onto the top component of the complex, such that the…
The study of the moment map from the Grassmannian to the hypersimplex, and the relation between torus orbits and matroid polytopes, dates back to the foundational 1987 work of Gelfand-Goresky-MacPherson-Serganova. On the other hand, the amplituhedron is a very new object, defined by Arkani-Hamed-Trnka in connection with scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. In this paper we discover a striking duality between the moment map $μ:Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}\toΔ_{k+1,n}$ from the positive Grassmannian $Gr^{\geq0}_{k+1,n}$ to the hypersimplex, and the amplituhedron map $\tilde{Z}…
We introduce a natural generalization of the scattering equations, which connect the space of Mandelstam invariants to that of points on ${\mathbb{CP}^1}$, to higher-dimensional projective spaces $\mathbb{CP}^{k-1}$. The standard, $k=2$ Mandelstam invariants, $s_{ab}$, are generalized to completely symmetric tensors $\textsf{s}_{a_1a_2\ldots a_k}$ subject to a `massless' condition $\textsf{s}_{a_1a_2\cdots a_{k-2}\,b\,b}=0$ and to `momentum conservation'. The scattering equations are obtained by constructing a potential function and computing its critical points. We mainly concentrate on the $…
The biadjoint scalar partial amplitude, $m_n(\mathbb{I},\mathbb{I})$, can be expressed as a single integral over the positive tropical Grassmannian thus producing a Global Schwinger Parameterization. The first result in this work is an extension to all partial amplitudes $m_n(α,β)$ using a limiting procedure on kinematic invariants that produces indicator functions in the integrand. The same limiting procedure leads to an integral representation of $ϕ^4$ amplitudes where indicator functions turn into Dirac delta functions. Their support decomposes into $\textrm{C}_{n/2-1}$ regions, with $\text…
In a recent paper Baker and Bowler introduced matroids over hyperfields, offering a common generalization of matroids, oriented matroids, and linear subspaces of based vector spaces. This paper introduces the notion of a topological hyperfield and explores the generalization of Grassmannians and realization spaces to this context, particularly in relating the (hyper)fields R and C to hyperfields arising in matroid theory and in tropical geometry.
The positive Grassmannian $Gr_{k,n}^{\geq 0}$ is the subset of the real Grassmannian where all Plücker coordinates are nonnegative. It has a beautiful combinatorial structure as well as connections to statistical physics, integrable systems, and scattering amplitudes. The amplituhedron $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m}(Z)$ is the image of the positive Grassmannian $Gr_{k,n}^{\geq 0}$ under a positive linear map $\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^{k+m}$. We will explain how ideas from oriented matroids, tropical geometry, and cluster algebras shed light on the structure of the positive Grassmannian and the amplit…
We study the problem of factorization for residues of generalized biadjoint scalar scattering amplitudes $m^{(k)}_n$, introduced by Cachazo, Early, Guevara and Mizera (CEGM), involving multi-dimensional residues which factorize generically into $k$-ary products of lower-point generalized biadjoint amplitudes of the same type $m^{(k)}_{n_1}\cdots m^{(k)}_{n_k}$, where $n_1+\cdots +n_k = n+k(k-1)$, noting that smaller numbers of factors arise as special cases. Such behavior is governed geometrically by regular matroid subdivisions of hypersimplices and cones in the positive tropical Grassmannian…
Given a point A in the real Grassmannian, it is well-known that one can construct a soliton solution u_A(x,y,t) to the KP equation. The contour plot of such a solution provides a tropical approximation to the solution when the variables x, y, and t are considered on a large scale and the time t is fixed. In this paper we give an overview of our work on the combinatorics of such contour plots. Using the positroid stratification and the Deodhar decomposition of the Grassmannian (and in particular the combinatorics of Go-diagrams), we completely describe the asymptotics of these contour plots whe…
Most data in genome-wide phylogenetic analysis (phylogenomics) is essentially multidimensional, posing a major challenge to human comprehension and computational analysis. Also, we can not directly apply statistical learning models in data science to a set of phylogenetic trees since the space of phylogenetic trees is not Euclidean. In fact, the space of phylogenetic trees is a tropical Grassmannian in terms of max-plus algebra. Therefore, to classify multi-locus data sets for phylogenetic analysis, we propose tropical support vector machines (SVMs). Like classical SVMs, a tropical SVM is a di…
In this article we use the cluster structure on the Grassmannian and the combinatorics of plabic graphs to exhibit a new aspect of mirror symmetry for Grassmannians in terms of polytopes. For our $A$-model, we consider the Grassmannian $\mathbb X=Gr_{n-k}(\mathbb{C}^n)$. The $B$-model is a Landau-Ginzburg model $(\check{\mathbb X}^\circ, W_q:\check{\mathbb X}^\circ \to \mathbb{C})$, where $\check{\mathbb X}^\circ$ is the complement of a particular anti-canonical divisor in a Langlands dual Grassmannian $\check{\mathbb X} = Gr_k((\mathbb{C}^n)^*)$, and the superpotential $W_q$ has a simple expr…
The KP equation is a nonlinear dispersive wave equation which provides an excellent model for resonant interactions of shallow-water waves. It is well known that regular soliton solutions of the KP equation may be constructed from points in the totally nonnegative Grassmannian Gr$(N,M)_{\geq 0}$. Kodama and Williams studied the asymptotic patterns (tropical limit) of KP solitons, called soliton graphs, and showed that they correspond to Postnikov's Le-diagrams. In this paper, we consider soliton graphs for the KP hierarchy, a family of commuting flows which are compatible with the KP equation.…
In recent work of Cachazo, Guevara, Mizera and the author, a generalization of the biadjoint scattering amplitude $m^{(k)}(\mathbb{I}_n,\mathbb{I}_n)$ was introduced as an integral over the moduli space of $n$ points in $\mathbb{CP}^{k-1}$, with value a sum of certain rational functions on the kinematic space $\mathcal{K}_{k,n}$. It was shown there for $m^{(3)}(\mathbb{I}_6,\mathbb{I}_6)$ and later by Cachazo and Rojas that collections of poles appearing in $m^{(3)}(\mathbb{I}_7,\mathbb{I}_7)$ are compatible exactly when they are dual to collections of rays which generate the maximal faces of …
In this paper we study the role of planarity in generalized scattering amplitudes, through several closely interacting structures in combinatorics, algebraic and tropical geometry. The generalized biadjoint scalar amplitude, introduced recently by Cachazo-Early-Guevara-Mizera (CEGM), is a rational function of homogeneous degree $-(k-1)(n-k-1)$ in $\binom{n}{k}-n$ independent variables; its poles can be constructed directly from the rays of the positive tropical Grassmannian. We introduce for each pair of integers $(k,n)$ with $2\le k\le n-2$ a system of generalized positive roots which arises …
