We implement new techniques involving Artin fans to study the realizability of tropical stable maps in superabundant combinatorial types. Our approach is to understand the skeleton of a fundamental object in logarithmic Gromov-Witten theory-the stack of prestable maps to the Artin fan. This is used to examine the structure of the locus of realizable tropical curves and derive three principal consequences. First, we prove a realizability theorem for limits of families of tropical stable maps. Second, we extend the sufficiency of Speyer's well-spacedness condition to the case of curves with good reduction. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of liftable genus 1 superabundant tropical curves that violate the well-spacedness condition.
BackgroundCentral to the application of tropical techniques to questions in algebraic geometry are so-called lifting theorems. Given a "synthetic" tropical object, such as a weighted balanced polyhedral complex, one must understand whether this object is the tropicalization of an algebraic variety. We deal in this paper with the case of curves. The tropical lifting question in this setting asks, when does an embedded tropical curve in R n arise as the tropicalization of an algebraic curve in a torus over a nonarchimedean field? This question becomes highly nontrivial in the so-called superabundant case and has been the primary obstacle to the application of tropical curve counting techniques in high genus settings. A tropical curve in R n encodes the combinatorial data in a degenerate logarithmic stable map to a toric variety. If the tropical curve is superabundant, i.e., if the tropical deformation space is larger than expected, the obstruction group of this degenerate logarithmic map is nonzero. As a result, such a map may not deform and the tropical curve may fail to be realizable. See Sect. 2.2 for a precise definition of superabundance. The earliest realization theorems for superabundant curves are due to Speyer, who observed a subtle combinatorial condition guaranteeing the realizability of superabundant genus 1 tropical curves [31]. While there has been substantial additional work in the intervening years, the general question remains mysterious [7,15,19,[23][24][25]29,34].In this note, we use recent technical breakthroughs in nonarchimedean geometry and the theory of logarithmic maps to provide a conceptual framework in which the realizability question may be approached. To demonstrate the efficacy of this framework, we use it to give simple proofs of three new results for lifting tropical curves. The same frame-
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