We give a bound on which singularities may appear on Kollár–Shepherd-Barron–Alexeev stable surfaces for a wide range of topological invariants and use this result to describe all stable numerical quintic surfaces (KSBA-stable surfaces with [Formula: see text]) whose unique non-Du Val singularity is a Wahl singularity. We then extend the deformation theory of Horikawa to the log setting in order to describe the boundary divisor of the moduli space [Formula: see text] corresponding to these surfaces. Quintic surfaces are the simplest examples of surfaces of general type and the question of describing their moduli is a long-standing question in algebraic geometry.
On the birational geometry of moduli spaces of pointed curves
