Tropical schemes, tropical cycles, and valuated matroids

Abstract: We show that the weights on a tropical variety can be recovered from the tropical scheme structure proposed by the Giansiracusas in arXiv:1308.0042, so there is a well-defined Hilbert-Chow morphism from a tropical scheme to the underlying tropical cycle. For a subscheme of projective space given by a homogeneous ideal I we show that this tropical scheme structure contains the same information as the set of valuated matroids of the vector spaces I_d for d \geq 0. We also give a combinatorial criterion to determine whether a given relation is in the congruence defining the tropical scheme structure.