For a linear subvariety $M$ of a stratum of meromorphic differentials, we investigate its closure in the multi-scale compactification constructed by Bainbridge-Chen-Gendron-Grushevsky-Möller. We prove various restrictions on the type of defining linear equations in period coordinates for $M$ near its boundary, and prove that the closure is locally a toric variety. As applications, we give a fundamentally new proof of a generalization of the cylinder deformation theorem of Wright to the case of meromorphic strata, and construct a smooth compactification of the Hurwitz space of covers of the Riemann sphere.
Double ramification loci, also known as strata of $0$-differentials, are algebraic subvarieties of the moduli space of smooth curves parametrizing Riemann surfaces such that there exists a rational function with prescribed ramification over $0$ and $\infty$. We describe the closure of double ramification loci inside the Deligne-Mumford compactification in geometric terms. To a rational function we associate its exact differential, which allows us to realize double ramification loci as linear subvarieties of strata of meromorphic differentials. We then obtain a geometric description of the clos…
We describe the boundary of linear subvarieties in the moduli space of multi-scale differentials. Linear subvarieties are algebraic subvarieties of strata of (possibly) meromorphic differentials that in local period coordinates are given by linear equations. The main example of such are affine invariant submanifolds, that is, closures of $\operatorname{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$-orbits. We prove that the boundary of any linear subvariety is again given by linear equations in generalized period coordinates of the boundary. Our main technical tool is an asymptotic analysis of periods near the boundary o…
The aim of this paper is to prove the existence of large complete subvarieties in moduli spaces of rank two stable sheaves with arbitrary $c_1$ and sufficiently large $c_2$ on algebraic surfaces. Then we study the restriction of these sheaves to curves of high degree embedded in the surface. In the final section we gives a relation with the spin strata defined by Pidstrigach and Tyurin.
We prove that the nonvarying strata of abelian and quadratic differentials in [CM1, CM2] have trivial tautological rings and are affine varieties. We also prove that strata of $k$-differentials of infinite area are affine varieties for all $k$. Vanishing of homology in degree higher than the complex dimension follows as a consequence for these affine strata. Moreover we prove that the stratification of the Hodge bundle for abelian and quadratic differentials of finite area is extremal in the sense that merging two zeros in each stratum leads to an extremal effective divisor in the boundary. A …
We compute a closed formula for the class of the closure of the locus of curves in $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_g$ that admit an abelian differential of signature $κ=(k_1,...,k_{g-2})$.
Affine varieties among all algebraic varieties have simple structures. For example, an affine variety does not contain any complete algebraic curve. In this paper we study affine related properties of strata of $k$-differentials on smooth curves which parameterize sections of the $k$-th power of the canonical line bundle with prescribed orders of zeros and poles. We show that if there is a prescribed pole of order at least $k$, then the corresponding stratum does not contain any complete curve. Moreover, we explore the amusing question whether affine invariant manifolds arising from Teichmülle…
This paper focuses on the interplay between the intersection theory and the Teichmueller dynamics on the moduli space of curves. As applications, we study the cycle class of strata of the Hodge bundle, present an algebraic method to calculate the class of the divisor parameterizing abelian differentials with a non-simple zero, and verify a number of extremal effective divisors on the moduli space of pointed curves in low genus.
A $k$-differential on a Riemann surface is a section of the $k$-th power of the canonical line bundle. Loci of $k$-differentials with prescribed number and multiplicities of zeros and poles form a natural stratification of the moduli space of $k$-differentials. In this paper we give a complete description for the compactification of the strata of $k$-differentials in terms of pointed stable $k$-differentials, for all $k$. The upshot is a global $k$-residue condition that can also be reformulated in terms of admissible covers of stable curves. Moreover, we study properties of $k$-differentials …
Moduli spaces of Abelian and quadratic differentials are stratified by multiplicities of zeroes; connected components of the strata correspond to ergodic components of the Teichmuller geodesic flow. It is known that the strata are not necessarily connected; the connected components were recently classified by M. Kontsevich and the author and by E. Lanneau. The strata can be also viewed as families of flat metrics with conical singularities and with Z/2Z-holonomy. For every connected component of each stratum of Abelian and quadratic differentials we construct an explicit representative which i…
We describe the closure of the strata of abelian differentials with prescribed type of zeros and poles, in the projectivized Hodge bundle over the Deligne-Mumford moduli space of stable curves with marked points. We provide an explicit characterization of pointed stable differentials in the boundary of the closure, both a complex analytic proof and a flat geometric proof for smoothing the boundary differentials, and numerous examples. The main new ingredient in our description is a global residue condition arising from a full order on the dual graph of a stable curve.
We construct explicit closed GL(2, R)-invariant loci in strata of meromorphic differentials of arbitrary large dimension with fully degenerate Lyapunov spectrum. This answers a question of Forni-Matheus-Zorich.
We consider two applications of the strata of differentials of the second kind (all residues equal to zero) with fixed multiplicities of zeros and poles: Positivity: In genus $g=0$ we show any associated divisorial projection to $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{0,n}$ is $F$-nef and hence conjectured to be nef. We compute the class for all genus when the divisorial projection forgets only simple zeros and show in these cases the genus $g=0$ projections are indeed nef. Hurwitz spaces: We show the Hurwitz spaces of degree $d$, genus $g$ covers of $\mathbb{P}^1$ with pure branching (one ramified point ove…
Gendron proved that the strata of holomorphic differentials with prescribed orders of zeros do not contain complete algebraic curves by applying the maximum modulus principle to saddle connections. Here we provide an alternative proof for this result by using positivity of divisor classes on moduli spaces of curves.
Three decades ago Cornalba-Harris proved a fundamental positivity result for divisor classes associated to families of stable curves. In this paper we establish an analogous positivity result for divisor classes associated to families of stable differentials.
We state conjectures on the asymptotic behavior of the Masur-Veech volumes of strata in the moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials and on the asymptotics of their area Siegel-Veech constants as the genus tends to infinity.
In this paper, we study connected components of strata of the space of quadratic differentials lying over $\T_g$. We use certain general properties of sections of line bundles to put a upper bound on the number of connected components, and a generalized version of the Gauss map as an invariant to put a lower bound on the number of such components. For strata with sufficiently many zeroes of the same order we can state precisely the number of components.
For $g\geq2$, $j=1,\dots,g$ and $n\geq g+j$ we exhibit infinitely many new rigid and extremal effective codimension $j$ cycles in $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$ from the strata of quadratic differentials and projections of these strata under forgetful morphisms and show the same holds for $k$-differentials with $k\geq 3$ if the strata are irreducible. We compute the class of the divisors in the case of quadratic differentials which contain the first known examples of effective divisors on $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$ with negative $ψ_i$ coefficients.
Strata of $k$-differentials on smooth curves parameterize sections of the $k$-th power of the canonical bundle with prescribed orders of zeros and poles. Define the tautological ring of the projectivized strata using the $κ$ and $ψ$ classes of moduli spaces of pointed smooth curves along with the tautological class $η$ of the Hodge bundle. We show that if there is no pole of order $k$, then the tautological ring is generated by $η$ only, and otherwise it is generated by the $ψ$ classes corresponding to the poles of order $k$.
The main goal of this work is to construct and study a reasonable compactification of the strata of the moduli space of Abelian differentials. This allows us to compute the Kodaira dimension of some strata of the moduli space of Abelian differentials. The main ingredients to study the compactifications of the strata are a version of the plumbing cylinder construction for differential forms and an extension of the parity of the connected components of the strata to the differentials on curves of compact type. We study in detail the compactifications of the hyperelliptic minimal strata and of th…
In this paper we analyze the large genus asymptotics for intersection numbers between $ψ$-classes, also called correlators, on the moduli space of stable curves. Our proofs proceed through a combinatorial analysis of the recursive relations (Virasoro constraints) that uniquely determine these correlators, together with a comparison between the coefficients in these relations with the jump probabilities of a certain asymmetric simple random walk. As an application of this result, we provide the large genus limits for Masur-Veech volumes and area Siegel-Veech constants associated with principal …
We give an algebraic way of distinguishing the components of the exceptional strata of quadratic differentials in genus three and four. The complete list of these strata is (9, -1), (6,3,-1), (3,3,3, -1) in genus three and (12), (9,3), (6,6), (6,3,3) and (3,3,3,3) in genus four. This result is part of a more general investigation of disjointness of Teichmueller curves with divisors of Brill-Noether type on the moduli space of curves. As a result we show that for many strata of quadratic differentials in low genus the sum of Lyapunov exponents for the Teichmueller geodesic flow is the same for …
A $k$-differential on a Riemann surface is a section of the $k$-th power of the canonical bundle. Loci of $k$-differentials with prescribed number and multiplicities of zeros and poles form a natural stratification for the moduli space of $k$-differentials. The classification of connected components of the strata of $k$-differentials was known for holomorphic differentials, meromorphic differentials and quadratic differentials with at worst simple poles by Kontsevich--Zorich, Boissy and Lanneau, respectively. Built on their work we develop new techniques to study connected components of the st…
We address the question concerning the birational geometry of the strata of holomorphic and quadratic differentials. We show strata of holomorphic and quadratic differentials to be uniruled in small genus by constructing rational curves via pencils on K3 and del Pezzo surfaces respectively. Restricting to genus $3\leq g\leq6$, we construct projective bundles over a rational varieties that dominate the holomorphic strata with length at most $g-1$, hence showing in addition that these strata are unirational.
In this paper we consider the large genus asymptotics for Masur-Veech volumes of arbitrary strata of Abelian differentials. Through a combinatorial analysis of an algorithm proposed in 2002 by Eskin-Okounkov to exactly evaluate these quantities, we show that the volume $ν_1 \big( \mathcal{H}_1 (m) \big)$ of a stratum indexed by a partition $m = (m_1, m_2, \ldots , m_n)$ is $\big( 4 + o(1) \big) \prod_{i = 1}^n (m_i + 1)^{-1}$ as $2g - 2 = \sum_{i = 1}^n m_i$ tends to $\infty$. This confirms a prediction of Eskin-Zorich and generalizes some of the recent results of Chen-Moeller-Zagier and Sauva…
Let S be a closed topological surface. Haupt's theorem provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a complex-valued character of the first integer homology group of S to be realized by integration against a complex-valued 1-form that is holomorphic with respect to some complex structure on S. We prove a refinement of this theorem that takes into account the divisor data of the 1-form.
Using stable log maps, we introduce log twisted differentials extending the notion of abelian differentials to the Deligne-Mumford boundary of stable curves. The moduli stack of log twisted differentials provides a compactification of the strata of abelian differentials. The open strata can have up to three connected components, due to spin and hyperelliptic structures. We prove that the spin parity can be distinguished on the boundary of the log compactification. Moreover, combining the techniques of log geometry and admissible covers, we introduce log twisted hyperelliptic differentials, and…
The boundary of the multi-scale differential compactification of strata of abelian differentials admits an explicit combinatorial description. However, even for low-dimensional strata, the complexity of the boundary requires use of a computer. We give a description of the algorithms implemented in the SageMath package diffstrata to enumerate the boundary components and perform intersection theory on this space. In particular, the package can compute the Euler characteristic of strata using the methods developed by the same authors in [CMZ20].
We prove that for a generic element in a nonhyperelliptic component of an abelian stratum $\mathcal{H}_g(μ)$ in genus $g$, the underlying curve has maximal gonality. We extend this result to the case of quadratic strata when the partition $μ$ has positive entries. As a consequence we deduce that all nonhyperelliptic components of $\mathcal{H}_9(μ)$ are uniruled when $μ$ is a positive partition of 16 and all nonhyperelliptic components of $\mathcal{H}^2_g(μ)$ are uniruled when $μ$ is a positive partition of $4g-4$ and either $3\leq g\leq5$ or $g=6$ and $l(μ)\geq 4$.
We construct an algorithm for computing the cycle classes of the spin components of a stratum of differentials in the moduli space of stable curves $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$. In addition, we implement it within the Sage package admcycles. Our main strategy is to reconstruct these cycles by their restrictions to the boundary of $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$ via clutching maps. These restrictions can be computed recursively by smaller dimensional spin classes and determine the original class via a certain system of linear equations. To study the spin parities on the boundary of a stratum o…
We compute the dimension of the image of the forgetful map from $Z$ to the moduli space of curves, where $Z$ is a connected component of the stratum of $k$-differentials with an assigned partition $μ$, for the cases when $k=1$ with meromorphic partition and $k=2$ when the quadratic differentials have at worst simple poles.
We introduce a space of stable meromorphic differentials with poles of prescribed orders and define its tautological cohomology ring. This space, just as the space of holomorphic differentials, is stratified according to the set of multiplicities of zeros of the differential. The main goal of this paper is to compute the Poincaré-dual cohomology classes of all strata. We prove that all these classes are tautological and give an algorithm to compute them. In a second part of the paper we study the Picard group of the strata. We use the tools introduced in the first part to deduce several relati…
This paper lays the foundation for determining the Kodaira dimension of the projectivized strata of Abelian differentials with prescribed zero and pole orders in large genus. We work with the moduli space of multi-scale differentials constructed in [BCGGM2] which provides an orbifold compactification of these strata. We establish the projectivity of the moduli space of multi-scale differentials, describe the locus of canonical singularities, and compute a series of effective divisor classes. Moreover, we exhibit a perturbation of the canonical class which allows the corresponding pluri-canonic…
Non-asphericity of strata of genus-one differentials and stability spaces
Boston College（波士顿学院）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications（北京数学科学与应用研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
