Universality for tropical and logarithmic maps

Abstract

We prove that every toric monoid appears in a space of maps from tropical curves to an orthant. It follows that spaces of logarithmic maps to Artin fans exhibit arbitrary toric singularities: a virtual universality theorem for logarithmic maps to pairs. The target rank depends on the chosen singularity: we show that the cone over the 7-gon never appears in a space of maps to a rank 1 target. We obtain similar results for tropical maps to affine space.

22 pages. Comments welcome. v5: Minor changes