Reduction of the Hurwitz space of metacyclic covers (Q1880949)

The stable reduction of some Galois covers of the projective line branched at three points is computed by using Hurwitz spaces parameterizing metacyclic covers. The reduction is determined by a certain hypergeometric differential equation, which generalizes the result of \textit{P. Deligne} and \textit{M. Rapoport} on the reduction of modular curve \(X(p)\) [in: Modular functions and variable II, Proc. internat. Summer School, Univ. Antwerp 1972, Lect. Notes Math. 349, 143--316 (1973; Zbl 0281.14010)].