Tropical curves with a singularity in a fixed point (Q663306)

This paper in a sense opens the study of tropical singularity theory. It is devoted to non-degenerate singularities of tropical plane curves. As it happens over many exotic fields (like e. g. over the real numbers), the non-degenerate singularity over tropical semifield has several non-equivalent forms. The authors classify these forms and describe their embedded resolutions (tropical blow-ups). Technically, in the space of all linear combinations of monomials of two variables from a finite set \(A\), they consider the set of all polynomials defining plane curves with a singularity at a given point. This set is almost the same as the \(A\)-discriminant of [\textit{I.~Gelfand}, \textit{M.~Kapranov} and \textit{A.~Zelevinsky}, Discriminants, resultants, and multidimensional determinants. Mathematics: Theory \&{} Applications. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser. (1994; Zbl 0827.14036)], whose tropicalization, called the tropical discriminant (see [\textit{A.~Dickenstein}, \textit{E.~Feichtner} and \textit{B.~Sturmfels}, J. Am. Math. Soc. 20, No. 4, 1111--1133 (2007; Zbl 1166.14033)]), is a subfan of the secondary fan of \(A\). Every tropical curve, corresponding to a point of the tropical discriminant, is endowed with a marked ``singular'' point, which is the limit of the singularities of classical curves, tropicalizing to this tropical curve. In this sense, the tropical discriminant parameterizes the family of all plane singular tropical curves, although the same curve may correspond to a positive-dimensional set of points in the discriminant. The authors classify the top-dimensional cones of the tropical discriminant, corresponding to the top-dimensional pieces of the family of all singular tropical curves, and, for every such cone, describe the corresponding singular tropical curve near its singularity and construct its tropical blow-up, reflecting the blow-up of the corresponding classical singularity. This construction clarifies the geometrical meaning of refinements of tropical curves in the earlier proof of Mikhalkin's correspondence theorem [\textit{G. Mikhalkin}, J. Am. Math. Soc. 18, 313--377 (2005; Zbl 1092.14068)] by the third author (see, e. g., [\textit{I.~Itenberg}, \textit{G.~Mikhalkin} and \textit{E.~Shustin}, Tropical algebraic geometry. Oberwolfach Seminars 35. Basel: Birkhäuser. (2007; Zbl 1165.14002)]).