To prove log-concavity of the characteristic polynomials of matroids, Adiprasito-Huh-Katz proved the Kähler package (the hard Lefschetz theorem and the Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations) for their Chow rings. Amini-Piquerez generalized it to tropical cohomology of smooth projective tropical varieties. Their proofs were combinatorial. In this paper, we establish tropical Hodge theory except for regularity of solutions of Laplacian, and give a conditional proof of the Kähler package in the same way as compact Kähler manifolds.
This is a sequel to our work in tropical Hodge theory. Our aim here is to prove a tropical analogue of the Clemens-Schmid exact sequence in asymptotic Hodge theory. As an application of this result, we prove the tropical Hodge conjecture for smooth projective tropical varieties which are rationally triangulable. This provides a partial answer to a question of Kontsevich who suggested the validity of the tropical Hodge conjecture could be used as a test for the validity of the Hodge conjecture.
In this paper we prove that the cohomology of smooth projective tropical varieties verify the tropical analogs of three fundamental theorems which govern the cohomology of complex projective varieties: Hard Lefschetz theorem, Hodge-Riemann relations and monodromy-weight conjecture. On the way to establish these results, we introduce and prove other results of independent interest. This includes a generalization of the results of Adiprasito-Huh-Katz, Hodge theory for combinatorial geometries, to any unimodular quasi-projective fan having the same support as the Bergman fan of a matroid, a tropi…
We construct motivic invariants of a subvariety of an algebraic torus from its tropicalization and initial degenerations. More specifically, we introduce an invariant of a compactification of such a variety called the "tropical motivic nearby fiber." This invariant specializes in the schon case to the Hodge-Deligne polynomial of the limit mixed Hodge structure of a corresponding degeneration. We give purely combinatorial expressions for this Hodge-Deligne polynomial in the cases of schon hypersurfaces and smooth tropical varieties. We also deduce a formula for the Euler characteristic of a gen…
Demailly showed that the Hodge conjecture is equivalent to the statement that any (p,p)-dimensional closed current with rational cohomology class can be approximated by linear combinations of integration currents associated to subvarieties, and asked whether any strongly positive (p,p)-dimensional closed current with rational cohomology class can be approximated by positive linear combinations of integration currents associated to subvarieties. Using tropical geometry, we construct a (p,p)-dimensional current on a smooth projective variety that does not satisfy the latter statement.
We consider the variation of tropical Hodge structure (TVHS) associated to families of tropical varieties. The family of the tropical intermediate Jacobians of the associated tropical Hodge structure defines a bundle of tropical Jacobians, whose sections we call the tropical normal functions. We define formal sequential derivatives of these functions on the base with respect to the natural Gauss-Manin connection as the Hodge theoretic invariants detecting tropical cycles in the fibers. The associated invariants which are defined inductively are the higher Abel-Jacobi invariants in the tropical…
The moduli space $M_g^{trop}$ of tropical curves of genus $g$ is a generalized cone complex that parametrizes metric vertex-weighted graphs of genus $g$. For each such graph $Γ$, the associated canonical linear system $\vert K_Γ\vert$ has the structure of a polyhedral complex. In this article we propose a tropical analogue of the Hodge bundle on $M_g^{trop}$ and study its basic combinatorial properties. Our construction is illustrated with explicit computations and examples.
We consider Gromov's homological higher convexity for complements of tropical varieties, establishing it for complements of tropical hypersurfaces and curves, and for nonarchimedean amoebas of varieties that are complete intersections over the field of complex Puiseaux series. Based on these results, we conjecture that the complement of a tropical variety has this higher convexity, and we prove a weak form of our conjecture for the nonarchimedean amoeba of a variety over the complex Puiseaux field. One of our main tools is Jonsson's limit theorem for tropical varieties.
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.
We initiate the study of positive-tropical generators as positive analogues of the concept of tropical bases. Applying this to the tropicalization of determinantal varieties, we develop criteria for characterizing their positive part. We focus on the study of low-rank matrices, in particular matrices of rank 2 and 3. Moreover, in the case square-matrices of corank 1, we fully classify the signed tropicalization of the determinantal variety, even beyond the positive part.
We study the tropical Dolbeault cohomology of non-archimedean curves as defined by Chambert-Loir and Ducros. We give a precise condition for when this cohomology satisfies Poincaré duality. The condition is always satisfied when the residue field of the non-archimedean base field is the algebraic closure of a finite field. We also show that for curves over fields where the residue field is the field of complex numbers, the tropical (1,1)-Dolbeault cohomology can be infinite dimensional. Our main new ingredient is an exponential type sequence that relates tropical Dolbeault cohomology to the co…
The motivic nearby fiber is an invariant obtained from degenerating a complex variety over a disc. It specializes to the Euler characteristic of the original variety but also contains information on the variation of Hodge structure associated to the degeneration which is encoded as a limit mixed Hodge structure. However, this invariant is difficult to compute in practice. Using the techniques of tropical geometry we present a new formula for the motivic nearby fiber. Moreover, since there is a range of available software implementing the main algorithms in tropical geometry, our formula can be…
Tropical ideals, introduced in arXiv:1609.03838, define subschemes of tropical toric varieties. We prove that the top-dimensional parts of their varieties are balanced polyhedral complexes of the same dimension as the ideal. This means that every subscheme of a tropical toric variety defined by a tropical ideal has an associated class in the Chow ring of the toric variety. A key tool in the proof is that specialization of variables in a tropical ideal yields another tropical ideal; this plays the role of hyperplane sections in the theory. We also show that elimination theory (projection of var…
In analogy to chapter 9 of arXiv:0709.3705 we define an intersection product of tropical cycles on tropical linear spaces L^n_k, i.e. on tropical fans of the type max{0,x_1,...,x_n}^(n-k)*R^n. Afterwards we use this result to obtain an intersection product of cycles on every smooth tropical variety, i.e. on every tropical variety that arises from gluing such tropical linear spaces. In contrast to classical algebraic geometry these products always yield well-defined cycles, not cycle classes only. Using these intersection products we are able to define the pull-back of a tropical cycle along a …
This paper proves that when the $r \times r$ minors of an $m \times n$ matrix of indeterminates are not a tropical basis then the tropical prevariety has greater dimension than the tropical variety. It proves the same for the $r \times r$ minors of an $n \times n$ symmetric matrix of indeterminates when r > 4.
We study the behavior of theta characteristics on an algebraic curve under the specialization map to a tropical curve. We show that each effective theta characteristic on the tropical curve is the specialization of $2^{g-1}$ even theta characteristics and $2^{g-1}$ odd theta characteristics. We then study the relationship between unramified double covers of a tropical curve and its theta characteristics, and use this to define the tropical Prym variety.
In this text, we show that locally tropically convex tropical varieties in $\mathbb{R}^n$ have locally a canonical polyhedral structure that satisfies higher balancing conditions at all cells of positive codimension.
To each prime ideal in a polynomial ring over a field we associate an algebraic matroid and show that it is preserved under tropicalization. This gives a necessary condition for a tropical variety to be set-theoretically realizable from a prime ideal. We also show that there are infinitely many Bergman fans that are not set-theoretically realizable as the tropicalization of any ideal.
This article studies the relationship between tropical Severi varieties and secondary fans. In the case when tropical Severi varieties are hypersurfaces this relationship is very well known; specifically, in this case, a tropical Severi variety of codimension 1 is a subfan of the corresponding secondary fan. It was expected for some time that this continues to hold more generally, but Katz found a counterexample in codimension 2, showing that this relationship is more subtle. The two main results in this paper are as follows. The first theorem finds a simple condition under which a tropical Se…
We give several characterizations of stable intersections of tropical cycles and establish their fundamental properties. We prove that the stable intersection of two tropical varieties is the tropicalization of the intersection of the classical varieties after a generic rescaling. A proof of Bernstein's theorem follows from this. We prove that the tropical intersection ring of tropical cycle fans is isomorphic to McMullen's polytope algebra. It follows that every tropical cycle fan is a linear combination of pure powers of tropical hypersurfaces, which are always realizable. We prove that ever…
We study algebraic and combinatorial aspects of (classical) projections of $m$-dimensional tropical varieties onto $(m+1)$-dimensional planes. Building upon the work of Sturmfels, Tevelev, and Yu on tropical elimination as well as the work of the authors on projection-based tropical bases, we characterize algebraic properties of the relevant ideals and provide a characterization of the dual subdivision (as a subdivision of a fiber polytope). This dual subdivision naturally leads to the issue of self-intersections of a tropical variety under projections. For the case of curves, we provide some …
A variety of codimension $c$ in complex affine space is called positively hyperbolic if the imaginary part of any point in it does not lie in any positive linear subspace of dimension $c$. Positively hyperbolic hypersurfaces are defined by stable polynomials. We give a new characterization of positively hyperbolic varieties using sign variations, and show that they are equivalently defined by being hyperbolic with respect to the positive part of the Grassmannian, in the sense of Shamovich and Vinnikov. We prove that positively hyperbolic projective varieties have tropicalizations that are loca…
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…
We investigate the problem of counting tropical genus g curves in g-dimensional tropical abelian varieties. For g = 2, 3, we prove that the tropical count matches the count provided by Göttsche, Bryan-Leung, and Lange-Sernesi in the complex setting.
We apply ideas from intersection theory on toric varieties to tropical intersection theory. We introduce mixed Minkowski weights on toric varieties which interpolate between equivariant and ordinary Chow cohomology classes on complete toric varieties. These objects fit into the framework of tropical intersection theory developed by Allermann and Rau. Standard facts about intersection theory on toric varieties are applied to show that the definitions of tropical intersection product on tropical cycles in $\R^n$ given by Allermann-Rau and Mikhalkin are equivalent. We introduce an induced tropica…
We study the tropicalizations of Severi varieties, which we call tropical Severi varieties. In this paper, we give a partial answer to the following question, ``describe the tropical Severi varieties explicitly.'' We obtain a description of tropical Severi varieties in terms of regular subdivisions of polygons. As an intermediate step, we construct explicit parameter spaces of curves. These parameter spaces are much simpler objects than the corresponding Severi variety and they are closely related to flat degenerations of the Severi variety, which in turn describes the tropical Severi variety.…
We study the combinatorial properties of 2-dimensional tropical complexes. In particular, we prove tropical analogues of the Hodge index theorem and Noether's formula. In addition, we introduce algebraic equivalence for divisors on tropical complexes of arbitrary dimension.
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 (1) characterize the Schubert varieties that arise as variations of Hodge structure (VHS); (2) show that the isotropy orbits of the infinitesimal Schubert VHS `span' the space of all infinitesimal VHS; and (3) show that the cohomology classes dual the Schubert VHS form a basis of the invariant characteristic cohomology associated to the infinitesimal period relation (a.k.a. Griffiths transversality).
In this article we define a natural tropicalization procedure for closed subsets of log-regular varieties in the case of constant coefficients and study its basic properties. This framework allows us to generalize some of Tevelev's results on tropical compactification as well as Hacking's result on the cohomology of the link of a tropical variety to log-regular varieties.
We use Batyrev-Borisov's formula for the generating function of stringy Hodge numbers of Calabi-Yau varieties realized as complete intersections in toric varieties in order to get closed form expressions for Hodge numbers of Calabi-Yau threefolds in five-dimensional ambient spaces. These expressions involve counts of lattice points on faces of associated Cayley polytopes. Using the same techniques, similar expressions may be obtained for higher dimensional varieties realized as complete intersections of two hypersurfaces.
We introduce a package for doing tropical computations in Macaulay2. The package draws on the functionality of Gfan and Polymake while making the process as simple as possible for the end user. This provides a powerful and user friendly tool for computing tropical varieties requiring little prerequisite knowledge.
We present an algorithm for computing zero-dimensional tropical varieties based on triangular decomposition and Newton polygon methods. From it, we derive algorithms for computing points on and links of higher-dimensional tropical varieties, using intersections with affine hyperplanes to reduce the dimension to zero. We use the algorithms to show that the tropical Grassmannians $\mathcal G_{3,8}$ and $\mathcal G_{4,8}$ are not simplicial.
We give a description of the tropical variety of univariate polynomials of degree n having two double roots. As a set, it is given as the union of three types of maximal cones of dimension n-1, where only cones of two of these types are cones of the secondary fan of {0,...,n}. Through Kapranov's theorem, this goal is achieved by a careful study of the possible valuations of the elementary symmetric functions of the roots of a polynomial with two double root. Despite its apparent simplicity, the computation of the tropical Severi variety has both combinatorial and arithmetic ingredients.
I demonstrate how certain identities for Macdonald's polynomials established by Garsia, Haiman and Tesler, together with the conjecture of Hausel, Letellier and Villegas imply explicit relations between mixed Hodge polynomials of different character varieties.
We use piecewise polynomials to define tropical cocycles generalising the well-known notion of tropical Cartier divisors to higher codimensions. Groups of cocycles are tropical analogues of Chow cohomology groups. We also introduce an intersection product of cocycles with tropical cycles - the counterpart of the classical cap product - and prove that this gives rise to a Poincaré duality in some cases.
We define an intersection product of tropical cycles on matroid varieties (via cutting out the diagonal) and show that it is well-behaved. In particular, this enables us to intersect cycles on moduli spaces of tropical rational marked curves $M_{0,n}$ and $M_{0,n}(\R^r, d)$. This intersection product can be extended to smooth varieties (whose local models are matroid varieties). We also study pull-backs of cycles and rational equivalence.
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-…
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 present an algorithm for computing zero-dimensional tropical varieties using projections. Our main tools are fast unimodular transforms of lexicographical Gröbner bases. We prove that our algorithm requires only a polynomial number of arithmetic operations if given a Gröbner basis, and we demonstrate that our implementation compares favourably to other existing implementations. Applying it to the computation of general positive-dimensional tropical varieties, we argue that the complexity for calculating tropical links is dominated by the complexity of the Gröbner walk.
Period domains, the classifying spaces for (pure, polarized) Hodge structures, and more generally Mumford-Tate domains, arise as open $G_{\mathbb{R}}$--orbits in flag varieties $G/P$. We investigate Hodge--theoretic aspects of the geometry and representation theory associated with these flag varieties. In particular, we relate the Griffiths--Yukawa coupling to the variety of lines on $G/P$ (under a minimal homogeneous embedding), construct a large class of polarized $G_{\mathbb{R}}$--orbits in $G/P$, and compute the associated Hodge--theoretic boundary components. An emphasis is placed through…
