Tropical adic spaces I: the continuous spectrum of a topological semiring

Abstract Toward building tropical analogues of adic spaces, we study certain spaces of prime congruences as a topological semiring replacement for the space of continuous valuations on a topological ring. This requires building the theory of topological idempotent semirings, and we consider semirings of convergent power series as a primary example. We consider the semiring of convergent power series as a topological space by defining a metric on it. We check that, in tropical toric cases, the proposed objects carry meaningful geometric information. In particular, we show that the dimension behaves as expected. We give an explicit characterization of the points in terms of classical polyhedral geometry in a follow-up paper.