Tropical Realization Spaces for Polyhedral Complexes

Abstract: Tropicalization is a procedure that assigns polyhedral complexes to algebraic subvarieties of a torus. If one fixes a weighted polyhedral complex, one may study the set of all subvarieties of a toric variety that have that complex as their tropicalization. This gives a "tropical realization" moduli functor. We use rigid analytic geometry and the combinatorics of Chow complexes as studied by Alex Fink to prove that when the ambient toric variety is quasiprojective, the moduli functor is represented by a rigid space. As an application, we show that if a polyhedral complex is the tropicalization of a formal family of varieties then it is the tropicalization of an algebraic family of varieties.