Forms on Berkovich spaces based on harmonic tropicalizations

Abstract: We introduce tropical skeletons for Berkovich spaces based on results of Ducros. Then we study harmonic functions on good strictly analytic spaces over a non-trivially valued non-Archimedean field. Chambert-Loir and Ducros introduced bigraded sheaves of smooth real-valued differential forms on Berkovich spaces by pulling back Lagerberg forms with respect to tropicalization maps. We give a new approach in which we allow pullback by more general harmonic tropicalizations to get a larger sheaf of differential forms with essentially the same properties, but with a better cohomological behavior. A crucial ingredient is that tropical varieties arising from harmonic tropicalization maps are balanced.