Related papers: Cellular decompositions of compactified moduli spa…
This survey covers earlier work of the author as well as recent work on Riemann's moduli space, its canonical cell decomposition and compactification, and the related operadic structure of arc complexes.
In 1969, P. Deligne and D. Mumford compactified the moduli space of curves. Their compactification is a projective algebraic variety, and as such, it has an underlying analytic structure. Alternatively, the quotient of the augmented…
A classical combinatorial fact is that the simplicial complex consisting of disjointly embedded chords in a convex planar polygon is a sphere. For any surface F with non-empty boundary, there is an analogous complex Arc(F) consisting of…
Following Deligne and Mumford we construct a coarse moduli space of smooth curves with non-abelian level structure, involving higher order commutators. We prove that its Deligne-Mumford compactification is smooth over an open part of…
There is a canonical identification, due to the author, of a convex real projective structure on an orientable surface of genus g and a pair consisting of a conformal structure together with a holomorphic cubic differential on the surface.…
We classify the Deligne-Mumford stacks M compactifying the moduli space of smooth $n$-pointed curves of genus one under the condition that the points of M represent Gorenstein curves with distinct markings. This classification uncovers new…
Let $S$ be a closed, oriented surface with a finite (possibly empty) set of points removed. In this paper we relate two important but disparate topics in the study of the moduli space $\M(S)$ of Riemann surfaces: Teichm\"{u}ller geometry…
In the moduli space M_g of genus g Riemann surfaces, consider the locus RM_O of Riemann surfaces whose Jacobians have real multiplication by the order O in a totally real number field F of degree g. If g = 2 or 3, we compute the closure of…
The space of smooth curves admits a beautiful compactification by the moduli space of Deligne-Mumford stable curves. In this paper, we undertake a systematic investigation of alternate modular compactifications of the space of smooth…
We explicitly describe the KSBA/Hacking compactification of a moduli space of log surfaces of Picard rank 2. The space parametrizes log pairs $(S, D)$ where $S$ is a degeneration of $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$ and $D \subset S$ is a…
Based on Teichm\"uller theory, we construct a degenerating family $\overline{Y}_g^{orb} \rightarrow \overline{M}_g^{orb}$ over the Deligne-Mumford compactification of the moduli space with the natural orbifold structure such that any…
Consider the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{g}$ of Riemann surfaces of genus $g\geq 2$ and its Deligne-Munford compactification $\bar{\mathcal{M}_{g}}$. We are interested in the branch locus ${\mathcal{B}_{g}}$ for $g>2$, i.e., the subset of…
We construct a smooth Deligne-Mumford compactification for the moduli space of curves with an m-tuple of spin structures using line bundles on quasi-stable curves as limiting objects, as opposed to line bundles on stacky curves. For all m,…
We determine the rational divisor class group of the moduli spaces of smooth pointed hyperelliptic curves and of their Deligne-Mumford compactification, over the field of complex numbers.
In this article, we derive estimates of Teichm\"uller modular forms, and associated invariants. Let $\mathcal{M}_{g}$ denote the moduli space of compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces of genus $g\geq 2$, and let $\overline{M}_{g}$ be the…
We construct a new compactification of the moduli space of maps from pointed nonsingular projective stable curves to a nonsingular projective variety with prescribed ramification indices at the points. It is shown to be a proper…
We prove that the separated curve complex of a closed orientable surface of genus g is (g-3)-connected. We also obtain a connectivity property for a separated curve complex of the open surface that is obtained by removing a finite set from…
We describe a period map for those simply connected Enriques surfaces in characteristic 2 whose canonical double cover is K3. The moduli stack for these surfaces has a Deligne-Mumford quotient that is an open substack of a $\mathbb…
We prove a semisimplicity result for the boundary, in the corresponding Deligne-Mumford compactification, of a totally geodesic subvariety of a moduli space of Riemann surfaces. At the level of Teichm\"uller space, this semisimplicity…
In this paper, we prove that each injective simplicial map of the arc complex of a compact, connected, orientable surface with nonempty boundary is induced by a homeomorphism of the surface. We deduce, from this result, that the group of…