CANONICAL REPRESENTATIVES for DIVISOR CLASSES on TROPICAL CURVES and the MATRIX-TREE THEOREM

Abstract

Let be a compact tropical curve (or metric graph) of genus. Using the theory of tropical theta functions, Mikhalkin and Zharkov proved that there is a canonical effective representative (called a break divisor) for each linear equivalence class of divisors of degree. We present a new combinatorial proof of the fact that there is a unique break divisor in each equivalence class, establishing in the process an 'integral' version of this result which is of independent interest. As an application, we provide a 'geometric proof' of (a dual version of) Kirchhoff's celebrated matrix-tree theorem. Indeed, we show that each weighted graph model for gives rise to a canonical polyhedral decomposition of the dimensional real torus into parallelotopes, one for each spanning tree of, and the dual Kirchhoff theorem becomes the statement that the volume of is the sum of the volumes of the cells in the decomposition.