research

This paper investigates the relationship between strata of abelian differentials and various mapping class groups afforded by means of the topological monodromy representation. Building off of prior work of the authors, we show that the fundamental group of a stratum surjects onto the subgroup of the mapping class group which preserves a fixed framing of the underlying Riemann surface, thereby giving a complete characterization of the monodromy group. In the course of our proof we also show that these “framed mapping class groups” are finitely generated (even though they are of infinite index) and give explicit generating sets.

For g ≥ 5, we give a complete classification of the connected components of strata of abelian differentials over Teichmüller space, establishing an analogue of a theorem of Kontsevich and Zorich in the setting of marked translation surfaces. Building on work of the first author, 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 subgroups of the mapping class group, completing a project begun by the second author. Some corollaries in flat geometry and toric geometry are obtained from these results.

Let Σ be a surface with either boundary or marked points, equipped with an arbitrary framing. In this note we determine the action of the associated “framed mapping class group” on the homology of Σ relative to its boundary (respectively marked points), describing the image as the kernel of a certain crossed homomorphism related to classical spin structures. Applying recent work of the authors, we use this to describe the monodromy action of the orbifold fundamental group of a stratum of abelian differentials on the relative periods.

This paper describes connected components of the strata of holomorphic abelian differentials on marked Riemann surfaces with prescribed degrees of zeros. Unlike the case for unmarked Riemann surfaces, we find there can be many connected components, distinguished by roots of the cotangent bundle of the surface. In the course of our investigation we also characterize the images of the fundamental groups of strata inside of the mapping class group. The main techniques of proof are mod r winding numbers and a mapping class group–theoretic analogue of the Euclidean algorithm.

We present explicit geometric decompositions of the hyperbolic complements of alternating k- uniform tiling links, which are alternating links whose projection graphs are k-uniform tilings of S2, E2, or H2. A consequence of this decomposition is that the volumes of spherical alternating k-uniform tiling links are precisely twice the maximal volumes of the ideal Archimedean solids of the same combinatorial description, and the hyperbolic structures for the hyperbolic alternating tiling links come from the equilateral realization of the k-uniform tiling on H2. In the case of hyperbolic tiling links, we are led to consider links embedded in thickened surfaces Sg × I with genus g ≥ 2 and totally geodesic boundaries. We generalize the bipyramid construction of Adams to truncated bipyramids and use them to prove that the set of possible volume densities for all hyperbolic links in Sg × I, ranging over all g ≥ 2, is a dense subset of the interval [0, 2voct], where voct ≈ 3.66386 is the volume of the ideal regular octahedron.

The volume density of a hyperbolic link is defined as the ratio of hyperbolic volume to crossing number. We study its properties and a closely-related invariant called the determinant density. It is known that the sets of volume densities and determinant densities of links are dense in the interval [0,v_{oct}]. We construct sequences of alternating knots whose volume and determinant densities both converge to any x in [0,v_{oct}]. We also investigate the distributions of volume and determinant densities for hyperbolic rational links, and establish upper bounds and density results for these invariants.