On the Moduli Space of a Spherical Polygonal Linkage

We give a “wall-crossing” formula for computing the topology of the moduli space of a closed n-gon linkage on 𝕊2. We do this by determining the Morse theory of the function ρn on the moduli space of n-gon linkages which is given by the length of the last side—the length of the last side is allowed to vary, the first (n − 1) side-lengths are fixed. We obtain a Morse function on the (n − 2)-torus with level sets moduli spaces of n-gon linkages. The critical points of ρn are the linkages which are contained in a great circle. We give a formula for the signature of the Hessian of ρn at such a linkage in terms of the number of back-tracks and the winding number. We use our formula to determine the moduli spaces of all regular pentagonal spherical linkages.