In two fundamental classical papers, Masur and Veech have independently proved that the Teichmueller geodesic flow acts ergodically on each connected component of each stratum of the moduli space of quadratic differentials. It is therefore interesting to have a classification of the ergodic components. Veech has proved that these strata are not necessarily connected. In a recent work, Kontsevich and Zorich have completely classified the components in the particular case where the quadratic differentials are given by the global square of Abelian differentials.
Here we are interested in the complementary case. In a previous paper, we have described some particular component, namely the hyperelliptic connected components, and showed that some strata are non-connected. In this paper, we give the general classification theorem: up to four exceptional cases in low genera, the strata of meromorphic quadratic differentials are either connected, or have exactly two connected components. In this last case, one component is hyperelliptic, the other not.
Our proof is based on a new approach of the so-called Jenkins-Strebel differential. We will present and use the notion of generalized permutations.
We present an explicit formula relating volumes of strata of meromorphicquadratic differentials with at most simple poles on Riemann surfacesand counting functions of the number of flat cylinders filled by closedgeodesics in associated flat metric with singularities. This generalizes the resultof Athreya, Eskin and Zorich in genus 0 to higher genera.
In this paper, we study fundamental groups of strata of the moduli space of quadratic differentials. We use certain properties of the Abel-Jacobi map, combined with local surgeries on quadratic differentials, to construct quotient groups of the fundamental groups for a particular family of strata.
The volumes of strata of Abelian or quadratic differentials play an important role in the study of dynamics on flat surfaces, related to dynamics in polygonal billiards. This article reviews all known ways to compute volumes in the quadratic case and provides explicit values of volumes of the strata of meromorphic quadratic differentials with at most simple poles in all low dimensions.
Very few results are known about the topology of the strata of the moduli space of quadratic differentials. In this paper, we prove that any connected component of such strata has only one topological end. A typical flat surface in a neighborhood of the boundary is naturally split by a collection of parallel short saddle connections, but the discrete data associated to this splitting can be quite difficult to describe. In order to bypass these difficulties, we use the Veech zippered rectangles construction and the corresponding (extended) Rauzy classes.
In this paper, we study the translation surfaces corresponding to meromorphic differentials on compact Riemann surfaces. We compute the number of connected components of the corresponding strata of the moduli space. We show that in genus greater than or equal to two, one has up to three components with a similar description as the one of Kontsevich and Zorich for the moduli space of Abelian differentials. In genus one, one can obtain an arbitrarily large number of connected components that are easily distinghished by a simple topological invariant.
The moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{g}$ of compact Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ has orbifold structure, and the set of singular points of such orbifold is the \textit{branch locus} $\mathcal{B}_{g}$. Given a prime number $p \ge 7$, $\mathcal{B}_{g}$ contains isolated strata consisting of $p$-gonal Riemann surfaces for genera $g \ge {3(p-1)\over 2}$,that are multiple of ${p-1 \over 2}$. This is a generalization of the results obtained in \cite{[BCI1]} for pentagonal Riemann surfaces, and the results of \cite{[K]} and \cite{[CI3]} for zero- and one-dimensional isolated strata in the branch locus.
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.
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.
We classify GL(2,R) invariant point markings over components of strata of Abelian differentials. Such point markings exist only when the component is hyperelliptic and arise from marking Weierstrass points or two points exchanged by the hyperelliptic involution. We show that these point markings can be used to determine the holomorphic sections of the universal curve restricted to orbifold covers of subvarieties of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces that contain a Teichmuller disk. The finite blocking problem is also solved for translation surfaces with dense GL(2,R) orbit.
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 state conjectures on the asymptotic behavior of the volumes of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials and their Siegel-Veech constants as genus tends to infinity. We provide certain numerical evidence, describe recent advances and the state of the art towards proving these conjectures.
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.
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 …
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 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 …
The object of this paper is to study GL(2,R) orbit closures in hyperelliptic components of strata of abelian differentials. The main result is that all higher rank affine invariant submanifolds in hyperelliptic components are branched covering constructions, i.e. every translation surface in the affine invariant submanifold covers a translation surface in a lower genus hyperelliptic component of a stratum of abelian differentials. This result implies finiteness of algebraically primitive Teichmuller curves in all hyperelliptic components for genus greater than two. A classification of all GL(2…
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 …
Moduli spaces of quadratic differentials with prescribed singularities are not necessarily connected. We describe here all cases when they have a special hyperelliptic connected component. We announce the general classification theorem: up to the four exceptional cases in low genera the strata of meromorphic quadratic differentials are either connected, or have exactly two connected components, and one of the two components is hyperelliptic.
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.
Configurations of rigid collections of saddle connections are connected component invariants for strata of the moduli space of quadratic differentials. They have been classified for strata of Abelian differentials by Eskin, Masur and Zorich. Similar work for strata of quadratic differentials has been done in Masur and Zorich, although in that case the connected components were not distinguished. We classify the configurations for quadratic differentials on the Riemann sphere and on hyperelliptic connected components of the moduli space of quadratic differentials. We show that, in genera greate…
For g>2 we study the cohomology classes in the closure of a stratum of abelian differentials defined by the boundary strata of codimension one. As an application, we find an explicit stratification of the spin moduli space for an odd spin structure consisting of g-1 strata D_j of codimension j-1 such that D_j does not contain a complete subvariety for all j. We also recover some results of Koroktin and Zograf and of Chen using a unified topological approach.
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 …
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.
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 $k$.
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…
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 study relations between Rauzy classes coming from an interval exchange map and the corresponding connected components of strata of the moduli space of Abelian differentials. This gives a criterion to decide whether two permutations are in the same Rauzy class or not, without actually computing them. We prove a similar result for Rauzy classes corresponding to quadratic differentials.
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…
For $g \ge 5$, we give a complete classification of the connected components of strata of abelian differentials over Teichmüller space, establishing an analogue of Kontsevich and Zorich's classification of their components over moduli space. Building off of work of the first author (arXiv:1901.05482), we find that the non-hyperelliptic components are classified by an invariant known as an $r$-spin structure. This is accomplished by computing a certain monodromy group valued in the mapping class group. To do this, we determine explicit finite generating sets for all $r$-spin stabilizer subgroup…
This is the second of two articles that describe the moduli spaces of pseudoholomorphic, multiply punctured spheres in R x (S^1 x S^2) as defined by a certain natural pair of almost complex structure and symplectic form. The first article in this series described the local structure of the moduli spaces and gave existence theorems. This article describes a stratification of the moduli spaces and gives explicit parametrizations for the various strata.
We study framed translation surfaces corresponding to meromorphic differentials on compact Riemann surfaces, for which a horizontal separatrix is marked for each pole or zero. Such geometric structures naturally appear when studying flat geometry surfaces "near" the Deligne-Mumford boundary.We compute the number of connected components of the corresponding strata, and give a simple topological invariant that distinguishes them. In particular we see that for $g>0$, there are at most two such components, except in the hyperelliptic case.
We generalise to the genus one case several results of Thurston concerning moduli spaces of flat Euclidean structures with conical singularities on the two dimensional sphere. More precisely, we study the moduli space of flat tori with $n$ cone points and a prescribed holonomy $ρ$. In his paper `Flat Surfaces' Veech has established that under some assumptions on the cone angles, such a moduli space ${\mathcal{F}}_{[ρ]}\subset \mathscr M_{1,n}$ carries a natural geometric structure modeled on the complex hyperbolic space ${\mathbb C}{\mathbb{H} }^{n-1}$ which is not metrically complete. Using s…
The seminal work of Eskin-Masur-Zorich described the principal boundary of moduli spaces of abelian differentials that parameterizes flat surfaces with a prescribed generic configuration of short parallel saddle connections. In this paper we describe the principal boundary for each configuration in terms of twisted differentials over Deligne-Mumford pointed stable curves. We also describe similarly the principal boundary of moduli spaces of quadratic differentials originally studied by Masur-Zorich. Our main technique is the flat geometric degeneration and smoothing developed by Bainbridge-Che…
Consider the 1-dimensional Hurwitz space parameterizing covers of P^1 branched at four points. We study its intersection with divisor classes on the moduli space of curves. As an application, we calculate the slope of the Teichmuller curve parameterizing square-tiled cyclic covers and recover the sum of its Lyapunov exponents obtained by Forni, Matheus and Zorich. Motivated by the work of Eskin, Kontsevich and Zorich, we exhibit a relation among the slope of Hurwitz spaces, the sum of Lyapunov exponents and the Siegel-Veech constant for the moduli space of quadratic differentials.
In general, it is difficult to measure distances in the Weil-Petersson metric on Teichmüller space. Here we consider the distance between strata in the Weil-Petersson completion of Teichmüller space of a surface of finite type. Wolpert showed that for strata whose closures do not intersect, there is a definite separation independent of the topology of the surface. We prove that the optimal value for this minimal separation is a constant $δ_{1,1}$ and show that it is realized exactly by strata whose nodes intersect once. We also give a nearly sharp estimate for $δ_{1,1}$ and give a lower bound …
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）
