Amoebas of algebraic varieties and tropical geometry

Tropical algebraic geometry is an active new field of mathematics that establishes and studies some very general principles to translate algebro-geometric problems into purely combinatorial ones. This expository paper gives an introduction to these new techniques with a special emphasis on the recent applications to problems in enumerative geometry.

We show a case of Zilber's Exponential-Algebraic Closedness Conjecture, establishing that the conjecture holds for varieties which split as the product of a linear subspace of the additive group $\mathbb{C}^n$ and an algebraic subvariety of the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{C}^\times)^n$. This amounts to solving certain systems of exponential sums equations, and it generalizes old results of Zilber, which required stronger assumptions on the variety such as the linear space ...

To every rational complex curve $C \subset (\mathbf{C}^\times)^n$ we associate a rational tropical curve $\Gamma \subset \mathbf{R}^n$ so that the amoeba $\mathcal{A}(C) \subset \mathbf{R}^n$ of $C$ is within a bounded distance from $\Gamma$. In accordance with the terminology introduced by Passare and Rullg{\aa}rd, we call $\Gamma$ the spine of $\mathcal{A}(C)$. We use spines to describe tropical limits of sequences of rational complex curves.

For any curve $\mathcal{V}$ in a toric surface $X$, we study the critical locus $S(\mathcal{V})$ of the moment map $\mu$ from $\mathcal{V}$ to its compactified amoeba $\mu(\mathcal{V})$. We show that for curves $\mathcal{V}$ in a fixed complete linear system, the critical locus $S(\mathcal{V})$ is smooth apart from some real codimension $1$ walls. We then investigate the topological classification of pairs $(\mathcal{V},S(\mathcal{V}))$ when $\mathcal{V}$ and $S(\mathcal{V})$...

To a tropical $p$-cycle $V_{\mathbb{T}}$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$, we naturally associate a normal closed and $(p,p)$-dimensional current on $(\mathbb{C}^*)^n$ denoted by $\mathscr{T}_n^p(V_{\mathbb{T}})$. Such a "tropical current" $\mathscr{T}_n^p(V_{\mathbb{T}})$ will not be an integration current along any analytic set, since its support has the form ${\rm Log\,}^{-1}(V_{\mathbb{T}})\subset (\mathbb{C}^*)^n$, where ${\rm Log\,}$ is the coordinate-wise valuation with $\log(|.|)$. ...

To any algebraic curve A in a complex 2-torus $(\C^*)^2$ one may associate a closed infinite region in a real plane called the amoeba of A. The amoebas of different curves of the same degree come in different shapes and sizes. All amoebas in have finite area and, furthermore, there is an upper bound on the area in terms of the degree of the curve. The subject of this paper is the curves in a complex 2-torus whose amoebas are of the maximal area. We show that up to multiplic...

Recently Krichever proposed a generalization of the amoeba and the Ronkin function of a plane algebraic curve. In our paper higher-dimensional version of this generalization is studied. We translate to the generalized case different geometric results known in the standard amoebas case.

We review results of papers written on the topic of polynomial amoebas with an emphasis on computational aspects of the topic. The polynomial amoebas have a lot of applications in various domains of science. Computation of the amoeba for a given polynomial and describing its properties is in general a problem of formidable complexity. We describe the main algorithms for computing and depicting the amoebas and geometrical objects associated with them, such as contours and spin...

We produce for each tropical hypersurface $V(\phi)\subset Q=\mathbb{R}^n$ a Lagrangian $L(\phi)\subset (\mathbb{C}^*)^n$ whose moment map projection is a tropical amoeba of $V(\phi)$. When these Lagrangians are admissible in the Fukaya-Seidel category, we show that they are unobstructed objects of the Fukaya category, and mirror to sheaves supported on complex hypersurfaces in a toric mirror.

The amoeba of an affine algebraic variety V in (C^*)^r is the image of V under the map (z_1, ..., z_r) -> (log|z_1|, ..., log|z_r|). We give a characterisation of the amoeba based on the triangle inequality, which we call testing for lopsidedness. We show that if a point is outside the amoeba of V, there is an element of the defining ideal which witnesses this fact by being lopsided. This condition is necessary and sufficient for amoebas of arbitrary codimension, as well as f...