Related papers: Multitwists in big mapping class groups

This article is a revised version of the talk I gave at the conference ``Beauville Surfaces and groups'' held in Newcastle in June 2012. It presents some group theoretical methods to give bounds on the number of connected components of the…

It is proved that the mapping class group of any closed surface with finitely many marked points is quasiisometric to a CAT(0) cube complex. We provide two distinct proofs, one tailored to mapping class groups, and one applying to a larger…

Hyperelliptic mapping class groups are defined either as the centralizers of hyperelliptic involutions inside mapping class groups of oriented surfaces of finite type or as the inverse images of these centralizers by the natural…

We show that every irreducible, simply connected curve on a toric affine surface X over the field of complex numbers is an orbit closure of a multiplicative group action on X. It follows that up to the action of the automorphism group…

We prove that infinite mapping class group orbits are dense in the character variety of Deroin-Tholozan representations. In other words, the action is minimal except for finite orbits. Our arguments rely on the symplectic structure of the…

We generalize and refine the strure and disjointness theorems for non-deep contours obtained in the fundamental article 'Multiplicative bases and representation-finite algebras'. In particular we show that these contours do not occur in…

We investigate the problem of when big mapping class groups are generated by involutions. Restricting our attention to the class of self-similar surfaces, which are surfaces with self-similar ends space, as defined by Mann and Rafi, and…

We obtain Margulis-type asymptotic estimates for the number of free homotopy classes of closed geodesics on certain manifolds without conjugate points. Our results cover all compact surfaces of genus at least 2 without conjugate points.

In this paper we show that the normal closure of the mth power of a half-twist has infinite index in the mapping class group of a punctured sphere. Furthermore, in some cases we prove that the quotient of the mapping class group of the…

For any surface $\Sigma$ of infinite topological type, we study the Torelli subgroup ${\mathcal I}(\Sigma)$ of the mapping class group ${\rm MCG}(\Sigma)$, whose elements are those mapping classes that act trivially on the homology of…

Given any connected compact orientable surface, a pair of mapping classes are said to be procongruently conjugate if they induce a conjugate pair of outer automophisms on the profinite completion of the fundamental group of the surface. For…

We demonstrate the existence of numerous non-spin 4-manifolds for which the smooth Nielsen realization problem fails; namely, there exist finite subgroups of their mapping class groups that cannot be realized by any group of…

We use group theory to construct infinite families of maps on surfaces which are invariant under Wilson's map operations of order 3 but not under the operations of order 2, such as duality and Petrie duality.

We construct a complete invariant for non-wandering surface flows with finitely many singular points but without locally dense orbits. Precisely, we show that a flow $v$ with finitely many singular points on a compact connected surface $S$…

We introduce and study tame homeomorphisms of surfaces of infinite type. These are maps for which curves under iterations do not accumulate onto geodesic laminations with non-proper leaves, but rather just a union of possibly intersecting…

We show that the natural map from the mapping class groups of surfaces to the automorphism groups of free groups, induces an infinite loop map on the classifying spaces of the stable groups after plus construction. The proof uses…

Given a smooth curve defined over a field $k$ that admits a non-singular plane model over $\overline{k}$, a fixed separable closure of $k$, it does not necessarily have a non-singular plane model defined over the field $k$. We determine…

We study mapping class group orbits of homotopy and isotopy classes of curves with self-intersections. We exhibit the asymptotics of the number of such orbits of curves with a bounded number of self-intersections, as the complexity of the…

It was proved by Tien-Cuong Dinh and me that there is a smooth complex projective surface whose automorphism group is discrete and not finitely generated. In this paper, we will show that there is a smooth projective surface, birational to…

Let f be a Z/2Z-spin structureon a closed surface S of genus g>3. We determine a generating set of the stabilizer of f in the mapping class group of S consisting of Dehn twists about an explicit collection of 2g+1 curves in S. If g=3 then…