Gaps of saddle connection directions for some branched covers of tori

We compute the gap distribution of directions of saddle connections for two classes of translation surfaces. One class will be the translation surfaces arising from gluing two identical tori along a slit. These yield the first explicit computations of gap distributions for non-lattice translation surfaces. We show that this distribution has support at zero and quadratic tail decay. We also construct examples of translation surfaces in any genus $d>1$ that have the same gap distribution as the gap distribution of two identical tori glued along a slit. The second class we consider are twice-marked tori and saddle connections between distinct marked points with a specific orientation. These results can be interpreted as the gap distribution of slopes of affine lattices. We obtain our results by translating the question of gap distributions to a dynamical question of return times to a transversal under the horocycle flow on an appropriate moduli space.

Affine Equivalence and Saddle Connection Graphs of Half-Translation Surfaces

To every half-translation surface, we associate a saddle connection graph, which is a subgraph of the arc graph. We prove that every isomorphism between two saddle connection graphs is induced by an affine homeomorphism between the underlying half-translation surfaces. We also investigate the automorphism group of the saddle connection graph and the corresponding quotient graph.

Cherry flow: physical measures and perturbation theory

In this article we consider Cherry flows on the torus which have two singularities, a source and a saddle, and no periodic orbits. We show that every Cherry flow admits a unique physical measure, whose basin has full volume. This proves a conjecture given by Saghin and Vargas [Invariant measures for Cherry flows.Comm. Math. Phys.317(1) (2013), 55–67]. We also show that the perturbation of Cherry flows depends on the divergence at the saddle: when the divergence is negative, this flow admits a neighborhood, such that any flow in this neighborhood belongs to one of the following three cases: it has a saddle connection; it is a Cherry flow; it is a Morse–Smale flow whose non-wandering set consists of two singularities and one periodic sink. In contrast, when the divergence is non-negative, this flow can be approximated by a non-hyperbolic flow with an arbitrarily large number of periodic sinks.