Homology of tropical varieties

Given a closed subvariety of an algebraic torus, the associated tropical variety is a polyhedral fan in the space of 1-parameter subgroups of the torus which describes the behaviour of the subvariety at infinity. We show that the link of the origin has only top rational homology if a genericity condition is satisfied. Our result is obtained using work of Tevelev and Deligne’s theory of mixed Hodge structures.