Tropical fans and normal complexes: Putting the “volume” back in “volume polynomials”

Abstract

Associated to any divisor in the Chow ring of a simplicial tropical fan, we construct a family of polytopal complexes, called normal complexes, which we propose as an analogue of the well-studied notion of normal polytopes from the setting of complete fans. We describe certain closed convex polyhedral cones of divisors for which the “volume” of each divisor in the cone—that is, the degree of its top power—is equal to the volume of the associated normal complexes. For the Bergman fan of any matroid with building set, we prove that there exists an open family of such cones of divisors with nonempty interiors. We view the theory of normal complexes developed in this paper as a polytopal model underlying the combinatorial Hodge theory pioneered by Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz.