Twisted Translation Flows and Effective Weak Mixing

We introduce a twisted cohomology cocycle over the Teichmueller flow and prove a "spectral gap" for its Lyapunov spectrum with respect to the Masur-Veech measures. We then derive Hoelder estimates on spectral measures and bounds on the speed of weak mixing for almost all translation flows in every stratum of Abelian differentials on Riemann surfaces, as well as bounds on the deviation of ergodic averages for product translation flows on the product of a translation surface with a circle.