Metric properties of the tropical Abel–Jacobi map

Let Γ be a tropical curve (or metric graph), and fix a base point p∈Γ. We define the Jacobian group J(G) of a finite weighted graph G, and show that the Jacobian J(Γ) is canonically isomorphic to the direct limit of J(G) over all weighted graph models G for Γ. This result is useful for reducing certain questions about the Abel–Jacobi map Φ _p :Γ→J(Γ), defined by Mikhalkin and Zharkov, to purely combinatorial questions about weighted graphs. We prove that J(G) is finite if and only if the edges in each 2-connected component of G are commensurable over ℚ. As an application of our direct limit theorem, we derive some local comparison formulas between ρ and \varPhi_p^*(r){\varPhi}_{p}^{*}(\rho) for three different natural “metrics” ρ on J(Γ). One of these formulas implies that Φ _p is a tropical isometry when Γ is 2-edge-connected. Another shows that the canonical measure μ _Zh on a metric graph Γ, defined by S. Zhang, measures lengths on Φ _p (Γ) with respect to the “sup-norm” on J(Γ).