Spherical Tropicalization

Abstract

We extend tropicalization and tropical compactification of subvarieties of algebraic tori to subvarieties of spherical homogeneous spaces. Given a tropical compactification of a subvariety, we show that the support of the colored fan of the ambient spherical variety agrees with the tropicalization of the subvariety. The proof is based on our equivariant version of the attening by blow-up theorem. We provide many examples.