Harmonic Tropical Curves

Harmonic amoebas are generalizations of amoebas of algebraic curves embedded in complex tori. Introduced in \cite{Kri}, the consideration of such objects suggests to enlarge the scope of classical tropical geometry of curves. In the present paper, we introduce the notion of harmonic morphisms from tropical curves to affine spaces, and show how they can be systematically described as limits of families of harmonic amoeba maps on Riemann surfaces. It extends the fact that tropical curves in affine spaces always arise as degenerations of amoebas of algebraic curves. The flexibility of this machinery gives an alternative proof of Mikhalkin's approximation theorem for regular phase-tropical morphisms to any affine space, as stated e.g. in \cite{Mikh06}. All the approximation results presented here are obtained as corollaries of a theorem on convergence of imaginary normalized differentials on families of Riemann surfaces.