This paper initiates a research program that seeks to recover algebro-geometric Galois representations from combinatorial data. We study tropicalizations equipped with symmetries coming from the Galois-action present on the lattice of 1-parameter subgroups inside ambient Galois-twisted toric varieties. Over a Henselian field, the resulting tropicalization maps become Galois-equivariant. We call their images Galois-equivariant tropicalizations, and use them to construct a large supply of Galois representations in the tropical cellular cohomology groups of Itenberg, Katzarkov, Mikhalkin and Zharkov. We also prove two results which say that under minimal hypotheses on a variety X0 over a Henselian field K0, Galois-equivariant tropicalizations carry all of the arithmetic structure of X0. Namely, (1) the Galois-orbit of any point of X0 valued in the separable closure of K0 is reproduced faithfully as a Galois-set inside some Galoisequivariant tropicalization of our variety. (2) The Berkovich analytification of X0 over the separable closure of K0, equipped with its canonical Galois-action, is the inverse limit of all Galois-equivariant tropicalizations of our variety.
Contents