Constructing smooth and fully faithful tropicalizations for Mumford curves

Abstract

The tropicalization of an algebraic variety X is a combinatorial shadow of X, which is sensitive to a closed embedding of X into a toric variety. Given a good embedding, the tropicalization can provide a lot of information about X. We construct two types of these good embeddings for Mumford curves: Fully faithful tropicalizations, which are embeddings such that the tropicalization admits a section to the associated Berkovich space $X^{an}$ of X, and smooth tropicalizations. We also show that a smooth curve that admits a smooth tropicalization is necessarily a Mumford curve. Our key tool is a variant of a lifting theorem for rational functions on metric graphs.

20 pages, 7 figures;