Faithful tropicalisation and torus actions

© 2015, The Author(s).For any affine variety equipped with coordinates, there is a surjective, continuous map from its Berkovich space to its tropicalisation. Exploiting torus actions, we develop techniques for finding an explicit, continuous section of this map. In particular, we prove that such a section exists for linear spaces, Grassmannians of planes (reproving a result due to Cueto, Häbich, and Werner), matrix varieties defined by the vanishing of 3 × 3-minors, and for the hypersurface defined by Cayley’s hyperdeterminant.