Generic root counts and flatness in tropical geometry

arXiv2206.07838MaRDI QIDQ6402225FDOQ6402225

Authors: Paul Alexander Helminck, Yue Ren 

Publication date: 15 June 2022

Abstract: We use tropical and non-archimedean geometry to study generic root counts of families of polynomial equations. These families are given as morphisms of schemes $XoY$ that factor through a closed embedding into a relative torus over a parameter space $Y$. We prove a generalization of Bernstein's theorem for these morphisms, showing that the root count of a single well-behaved tropical fiber spreads to an open dense subset of $Y$. We use this to express the generic root count of a wide class of square systems in terms of the matroidal degree of an explicit variety. This in particular gives tropical formulas for the birational intersection indices and volumes of Newton-Okounkov bodies defined by Kaveh and Khovanskii, and the generic root counts of the steady-state equations of chemical reaction networks. An important role in these theorems is played by the notion of tropical flatness, which allows us to infer generic properties of $XoY$ from a single tropical fiber. We show that the tropical analogue of the generic flatness theorem holds, in the sense that $XoY$ is tropically flat over an open dense subset of the Berkovich analytification of $Y$.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Toric varieties, Newton polyhedra, Okounkov bodies (14M25) Solving polynomial systems; resultants (13P15) Applications of tropical geometry (14T90)

This page was built for publication: Generic root counts and flatness in tropical geometry

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6402225)