Paving Tropical Ideals

Abstract: Tropical ideals are a class of ideals in the tropical polynomial semiring that combinatorially abstracts the possible collections of supports of all polynomials in an ideal over a field. We study zero-dimensional tropical ideals I with Boolean coefficients in which all underlying matroids are paving matroids, or equivalently, in which all polynomials of minimal support have support of size deg(I) or deg(I)+1 -- we call them paving tropical ideals. We show that paving tropical ideals of degree d+1 are in bijection with $\mathbb Z^n$-invariant d-partitions of $\mathbb Z^n$. This implies that zero-dimensional tropical ideals of degree 3 with Boolean coefficients are in bijection with $\mathbb Z^n$-invariant 2-partitions of quotient groups of the form $\mathbb Z^n/L$. We provide several applications of these techniques, including a construction of uncountably many zero-dimensional degree-3 tropical ideals in one variable with Boolean coefficients, and new examples of non-realizable zero-dimensional tropical ideals.