Rel leaves of the Arnoux-Yoccoz surfaces (Q1744775)

The authors analyze the rel leaves of the Arnoux-Yoccoz translation surfaces. They show that for any genus \(g \geq 3\), the leaf is dense in the connected component of the stratum \(\mathcal{H}(g-1, g-1)\) to which it belongs, and the one-sided imaginary-rel trajectory of the surface is divergent. For one surface on this trajectory, namely the Arnoux-Yoccoz surface itself, the horizontal foliation is invariant under a pseudo-Anosov map (and in particular is uniquely ergodic), but for all other surfaces, the horizontal foliation is completely periodic. In the appendix the authors prove a field theoretic result needed for denseness of the leaf: for any \(n \geq 3\), the field extension of \(\mathbb{Q}\) obtained by adjoining a root of \(X^n - X^{n-1}- \dots- X - 1\) has no totally real subfields other than \(\mathbb{Q}\).