Delta-components of moduli spaces of covers (Q1940467)

This paper studies irreducible components of Hurwitz spaces. In particular, if \(G\) is a group, let H\(_r(G)\) be the coarse moduli space of \(G\)-Galois covers of the projective line branched at \(r\) points (this is called a Hurwitz space). One of the reasons to study this space is that, if \(G\) has trivial center, then a \(\mathbb{Q}\)-point of H\(_r(G)\) corresponds, using Hilbert's irreducibility theorem, to a \(G\)-Galois extension of \(\mathbb{Q}\). Thus one approach to the inverse Galois problem (at least for center-free groups) is to search for \(\mathbb{Q}\)-points of Hurwitz spaces. A first step toward this problem is to search for irreducible components of Hurwitz spaces defined over \(\mathbb{Q}\). This paper develops a method for composing irreducible components of different Hurwitz spaces to obtain irreducible components of still different Hurwitz spaces in a ``Galois-equivariant'' way. As a consequence, it is shown how to construct, for any \(G\), some H\(_r(G)\) with an irreducible component defined over \(\mathbb{Q}\) (as a matter of fact, one can take \(r = ns\), where \(n\) is the number of irreducible components of H\(_s(G)\) for some \(s \geq 2\)). The construction mentioned above comes from concatenating branch-cycle descriptions. In particular, if \(G\) is generated by subgroups \((G_i)_{1 \leq i \leq s}\), and if for each \(i\), we have a branch cycle description \((g_{i,j})_{1 \leq j \leq r_i}\) for a point in H\(_{r_i}(G_i)\), then one can form the branch cycle description \((g_{1, 1}, \dots, g_{1, r_1}, \dots, g_{s,1}, \dots, g_{s, r_s})\). This will correspond to a point in H\(_r(G)\), where \(r = \sum_{i=1}^s r_i\). It turns out that, using braid group methods, one can show that this descends to a map taking \(s\)-tuples consisting of an irreducible component of each H\(_{r_i}(G_i)\) to irreducible components of H\(_r(G)\). Under certain assumptions, the paper shows that this map is Galois-equivariant. The proof uses the idea of \textit{admissible covers}, which are covers of semi-stable curves living on the boundary of a certain compactification of Hurwitz spaces due to Wewers.