Homology of tropical varieties (Q848647)

To every closed subvariety of an algebraic torus one can assign a polyhedral fan, which is called the tropical fan of the variety and describes its behavior at infinity. The tropical fan is expected to inherit many geometric properties of the variety, but known results are mostly about curves so far. This well written paper deals with one of the first general questions: is it true that the link of the tropical fan of every variety is homotopy equivalent to a bouquet of spheres, or at least has the same homology as a bouquet of spheres? The author positively answers the latter (homology) version of this question for algebraic varieties satisfying a certain genericity assumption. This assumption is mild enough to make the result applicable to many important examples, including certain hyperplane arrangements and moduli spaces. The proof relies upon the notions of tropical compactification [\textit{J. Tevelev}, Am. J. Math. 129, No. 4, 1087--1104 (2007; Zbl 1154.14039)] and the weight filtration of the mixed Hodge structure [\textit{P. Deligne}, Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Etud. Sci. 40, 5--57 (1971; Zbl 0219.14007)].