Square-tiled cyclic covers

Giovanni Forni; Carlos Matheus; Anton Zorich

doi:10.3934/jmd.2011.5.285

Article Contents

2011, Volume 5, Issue 2: 285-318. Doi: 10.3934/jmd.2011.5.285

This issue Previous Article Outer billiards and the pinwheel map Next Article Lyapunov spectrum of square-tiled cyclic covers

Square-tiled cyclic covers

1.
Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-4015
2.
Collège de France, 3 Rue d’Ulm, Paris, CEDEX 05
3.
IRMAR, Université Rennes 1, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes cedex

Received: June 30, 2010

Revised: May 31, 2011

Published: June 2011

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Abstract

A cyclic cover of the complex projective line branched at four appropriate points has a natural structure of a square-tiled surface. We describe the combinatorics of such a square-tiled surface, the geometry of the corresponding Teichmüller curve, and compute the Lyapunov exponents of the determinant bundle over the Teichmüller curve with respect to the geodesic flow. This paper includes a new example (announced by G. Forni and C. Matheus in [17] of a Teichmüller curve of a square-tiled cyclic cover in a stratum of Abelian differentials in genus four with a maximally degenerate Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum (the only known example in genus three found previously by Forni also corresponds to a square-tiled cyclic cover [15]. We present several new examples of Teichmüller curves in strata of holomorphic and meromorphic quadratic differentials with a maximally degenerate Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum. Presumably, these examples cover all possible Teichmüller curves with maximally degenerate spectra. We prove that this is indeed the case within the class of square-tiled cyclic covers.

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Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 37D25, 37D40; Secondary: 14F05.

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