Amalgams of matroids, fibre products and tropical graph correspondences

Abstract

We prove that the proper amalgam of matroids $M_1$ and $M_2$ along their common restriction $N$ exists if and only if the tropical fibre product of Bergman fans ${B(M_1) \times_{B(N)} B(M_2)}$ is positive. We introduce tropical correspondences between Bergman fans as tropical subcycles in their product, similar to correspondences in algebraic geometry, and define a "graph correspondence" of the map of lattices. We prove that graph construction is a functor for the "covering" maps of lattices, exploiting a generalization of Bergman fan which we call a "Flag fan".