Zapponi-orientable dessins d'enfants (Q2177533)

Dessins d'enfants (french synonym for child-drawing) were introduced by Grothendieck in the 1980s in his famous \textit{Equisse d'un programme}. One of the main goals in this program was to study the absolute Galois group \(\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb {Q})\) by its action on geometric objects. Surprisingly, the natural action of \(\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb {Q})\) on dessins d'enfants is faithful. So in order to understand the mysterious \(\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb {Q})\), one of the problems is how to determine Galois orbits, or in other words to determine whether or not two given dessins d'enfants are in the same orbit of \(\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb {Q})\). The main Galois invariants in tackling this problem are \textit{genus, type, monodromy group, automorphism group} and \textit{passport}. In the article under review, the authors define two new Galois invariants, which they call \textbf{Z-orientability} and \textbf{twist-invariant orientability type}, by generalizing Zapponi's work. Moreover, they give five equivalent characterizations of Z-orientability and prove that \(\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb {Q})\) acts faithfully on the classes of Z-orientable dessins d'enfants. They also construct some interesting dessins d'enfants and show that the twist-invariant orientability type of a regular dessin d'enfant is determined by its monodromy group.