Counting Non-Crossing Permutations on Surfaces of any Genus

Given a surface with boundary and some points on the boundary, a polygon diagram is a way to connect those points as vertices of non-overlapping polygons on the surface. Such polygon diagrams represent non-crossing permutations on the surface. If only bigons are allowed, then one obtains the notion of arc diagrams, whose enumeration is known to have a rich structure. We show that the count of polygon diagrams on surfaces with any genus and number of boundary components exhibits similar structure. In particular it is almost polynomial in the number of points on the boundary components, and the leading coefficients of those polynomials are intersection numbers on compactified moduli spaces of curves.

The $${\mathcal {H}}$$-tautological ring

We extend the theory of tautological classes on moduli spaces of stable curves to the more general setting of moduli spaces of admissible Galois covers of curves, introducing the so-called $${\mathcal {H}}$$ H -tautological ring. The main new feature is the existence of restriction-corestriction morphisms remembering intermediate quotients of Galois covers, which are a rich source of new classes. In particular, our new framework includes classes of Harris–Mumford admissible covers on moduli spaces of curves, which are known in some (and speculatively many more) examples to lie outside the usual tautological ring. We give additive generators for the $${\mathcal {H}}$$ H -tautological ring and show that their intersections may be algorithmically computed, building on work of Schmitt-van Zelm. As an application, we give a method for computing integrals of Harris-Mumford loci against tautological classes of complementary dimension, recovering and giving a mild generalization of a recent quasi-modularity result of the author for covers of elliptic curves.

Single-valued integration and double copy

In this paper, we study a single-valued integration pairing between differential forms and dual differential forms which subsumes some classical constructions in mathematics and physics. It can be interpreted as a p-adic period pairing at the infinite prime. The single-valued integration pairing is defined by transporting the action of complex conjugation from singular to de Rham cohomology via the comparison isomorphism. We show how quite general families of period integrals admit canonical single-valued versions and prove some general formulae for them. This implies an elementary “double copy” formula expressing certain singular volume integrals over the complex points of a smooth projective variety as a quadratic expression in ordinary period integrals of half the dimension. We provide several examples, including non-holomorphic modular forms, archimedean Néron–Tate heights on curves, single-valued multiple zeta values and polylogarithms. The results of the present paper are used in [F. Brown and C. Dupont, Single-valued integration and superstring amplitudes in genus zero, preprint 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01107] to prove a recent conjecture of Stieberger which relates the coefficients in a Laurent expansion of two different kinds of periods of twisted cohomology on the moduli spaces of curves {\mathcal{M}_{0,n}} of genus zero with n marked points. We also study a morphism between certain rings of “motivic” periods, called the de Rham projection, which provides a bridge between complex periods and single-valued periods in many situations of interest.

Zero cycles on the moduli space of curves

While the Chow groups of 0-dimensional cycles on the moduli spaces of Deligne-Mumford stable pointed curves can be very complicated, the span of the 0-dimensional tautological cycles is always of rank 1. The question of whether a given moduli point [C,p_1,...,p_n] determines a tautological 0-cycle is subtle. Our main results address the question for curves on rational and K3 surfaces. If C is a nonsingular curve on a nonsingular rational surface of positive degree with respect to the anticanonical class, we prove [C,p_1,...,p_n] is tautological if the number of markings does not exceed the virtual dimension in Gromov-Witten theory of the moduli space of stable maps. If C is a nonsingular curve on a K3 surface, we prove [C,p_1,...,p_n] is tautological if the number of markings does not exceed the genus of C and every marking is a Beauville-Voisin point. The latter result provides a connection between the rank 1 tautological 0-cycles on the moduli of curves and the rank 1 tautological 0-cycles on K3 surfaces. Several further results related to tautological 0-cycles on the moduli spaces of curves are proven. Many open questions concerning the moduli points of curves on other surfaces (Abelian, Enriques, general type) are discussed. Comment: Published version

Buryak–Okounkov Formula for the n-Point Function and a New Proof of the Witten Conjecture

We identify the formulas of Buryak and Okounkov for the $n$-point functions of the intersection numbers of psi-classes on the moduli spaces of curves. This allows us to combine the earlier known results and this one into a principally new proof of the famous Witten conjecture/Kontsevich theorem, where the link between the intersection theory of the moduli spaces and integrable systems is established via the geometry of double ramification cycles.