Equations of tropical varieties (Q504013)

Since the birth of tropical geometry, an embedded tropical variety (affine, projective, etc.; most generally in a toric variety) has been just a subset, or at best a subset with integer multiplicities on its maximal faces, which allow it to be handled like a cycle in Chow cohomology. The present paper initiates a programme of Zariski-style foundations for tropical geometry. A notion of scheme structure is defined for embedded tropical varieties, using idempotent semirings as the algebraic base objects. \par Closed tropical subschemes of a toric variety correspond to quotients of its coordinate semiring, but these can no longer defined by ideals: in the absence of subtraction, identifying elements with zero isn't general enough to construct arbitrary quotients. If $R$ is a ring with a nonarchimedean valuation, subschemes $Z$ of toric varieties over $R$ can be tropicalised. This is done by constructing the \textit{bend relations} of an ideal $I$: we tropicalise the polynomials in $I$ in the familiar way, and for each resulting tropical polynomial $f$, we identify $f$ with each polynomial obtained by deleting a single one of its terms. (To say the minimum in a min-plus polynomial is obtained twice is to say it is unchanged upon deletion of any single term.) The usual set-theoretic tropicalisation, and indeed the ``extended tropicalisation'' of Kajiwara and Payne, is recovered from a subscheme by taking $\mathbb{T}$-valued points. \par Each ring $R$ has a \textit{universal} valuation in the set of generalised nonarchimedean valuations considered in this paper. This universal valuation is used to show that the moduli of valuations is representable in tropical schemes. The moduli space is the base of a universal family of tropicalisations of $Z$ as the valuation varies, for any $Z$ as above, and its $\mathbb{T}$-valued points form the Berkovich analytification of $R$. \par Each graded component of the coordinate ring of a tropical subscheme determines a valuated matroid. Tropicalisation preserves the dimension of these graded components, and therefore preserves Hilbert functions.