Generic root counts and flatness in tropical geometry

Abstract: We use tropical and non-archimedean geometry to study generic root counts of families of polynomial equations. These families are given as morphisms of schemes $X\to{Y}$ that factor through a closed embedding into a relative torus over a parameter space $Y$. We prove a generalization of Bernstein's theorem for these morphisms, showing that the root count of a single well-behaved tropical fiber spreads to an open dense subset of $Y$. We use this to express the generic root count of a wide class of square systems in terms of the matroidal degree of an explicit variety. This in particular gives tropical formulas for the birational intersection indices and volumes of Newton-Okounkov bodies defined by Kaveh and Khovanskii, and the generic root counts of the steady-state equations of chemical reaction networks. An important role in these theorems is played by the notion of tropical flatness, which allows us to infer generic properties of $X\to{Y}$ from a single tropical fiber. We show that the tropical analogue of the generic flatness theorem holds, in the sense that $X\to{{Y}}$ is tropically flat over an open dense subset of the Berkovich analytification of $Y$.