Tropical cycles of discrete admissible covers (2501.16074v2)

Abstract: This article applies the technical framework developed in previous work by the author to discrete admissible covers and their moduli spaces. More precisely, we construct a poic-space that parameterizes the discrete admissible covers after fixing the genus of the target, the number of marked legs, and prescribing the ramification profiles above these marked legs. We then construct a linear poic-fibration over this poic-space and show that the usual weight assignment of covers produces an equivariant cycle of this poic-fibration. This poic-fibration comes naturally with source and target maps, and after taking the weak pushforward in top dimension through the source map and subsequently forgetting the marking, this gives rise to an equivariant tropical cycle of the corresponding spanning tree fibration. Through this framework we obtain a generalization of previously known results on these cycles pertaining to the gonality of tropical curves. Special cases of these tropical cycles yield the following result: \emph{A generic genus-$g$ $r$-marked tropical curve $\Gamma$ (with $g+r$ even) has $C_{\frac{g+r}{2}}$ many $r$-marked discrete admissible covers of degree $\frac{g+r}{2}+1$ of a tree (counted with multiplicity) that have a tropical modification of $\Gamma$ as a source, where $C_{\frac{g+r}{2}}$ is the $(\frac{g+r}{2})$th Catalan number}.