A Caporaso-Harris type formula for Welschinger invariants of real toric Del Pezzo surfaces (Q1001223)

The authors use tropical geometry to obtain new formulas for Welschinger invariants on real toric Del Pezzo surfaces. So far there was only one rather complicated algorithm to compute Welschinger invariants, by counting certain lattice paths. It was introduced not long ago by \textit{G. Mikhalkin} [J. Am. Math. Soc. 18, No. 2, 313--377 (2005; Zbl 1092.14068)]. The Caporaso-Harris type formula which is presented here is much more efficient and can thus be considered as the first method to produce large examples of Welschinger-numbers. The authors combine techniques of \textit{A. Gathmann} and \textit{H. Markwig} developed in [J. Reine Angew. Math. 602, 155--177 (2007; Zbl 1115.14049) and Math. Ann. 338, No. 4, 845-868 (2007; Zbl 1128.14040)]. In the first paper, the numbers of tropical curves through a certain point configuration is shown to be independent of the point configuration. In the second paper, a tropical analogue of the algorithm of Caporaso and Harris is presented. The authors define tropical invariants which can be seen as the tropical counterparts of real analogues of relative Gromov-Witten invariants, or tropical relative Welschinger invariants. These tropical invariants are shown to be independent of the point configuration. Then, a recursive formula of Caporaso-Harris type for these invariants is derived. The new tropical invariants do not correspond to numbers of real curves satisfying tangency conditions. They are only defined tropically. However, they can be used to compute the usual real Welschinger invariant. As a side-effect, the authors give a new proof of the positivity of Welschinger invariants.