A transversal for horocycle flow on \(\mathcal{H}(\alpha)\) (Q2306059)

Let \(\mathcal{H}_1(\alpha)\) be a stratum of translation surfaces, normalized to have area one. The \(\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{R})\)-action on \(\mathcal{H}_1(\alpha)\) is ergodic with respect to the Masur-Veech measure. A consequence of this is the fact that the distribution of slopes of saddle-connections (straight lines between zeroes) on any Veech (or lattice) surface, or a generic surface in \(\mathcal{H}_1(\alpha)\), equidistributes on the unit circle. A finer statistic is the distribution of ``gaps'' in the slope distribution, the study of which was inspired by \textit{N. D. Elkies} and \textit{C. T. McMullen} [Duke Math. J. 123, No. 1, 95--139 (2004; Zbl 1063.11020)] who had used the horocycle flow on the space of unimodular lattices in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) to determine the distribution of the fractional part of \(\sqrt n\). See [\textit{J. S. Athreya}, Lond. Math. Soc. Lect. Note Ser. 425, 1--31 (2016; Zbl 1364.37006)] for the general strategy for determining this gap distribution on a translation surface, and the introduction of this paper of the author for a summary of the results obtained by Athreya and various others. The key observation is that the gaps in slopes remain invariant under the horocycle flow; and the strategy then is to construct a \textit{Poincaré section} of the flow, by considering the subset comprising surfaces with a horizontal saddle connection of length at most one, that each orbit intersects at a non-empty, countable and discrete set of times. This paper provides a general method to construct this transversal section for any stratum, in terms of the coordinates arising from the zippered-rectangle or interval-exchange description of a translation surface, due to [\textit{W. A. Veech}, Ann. Math. (2) 115, 201--242 (1982; Zbl 0486.28014); \textit{A. Zorich}, Ann. Inst. Fourier 46, No. 2, 325--370 (1996; Zbl 0853.28007)]. Using this, an explicit description of such a section for the horocycle flow on \(\mathcal{H}(2)\) is worked out.