Ellipses in translation surfaces (Q2429485)

A translation structure on a topological surface is an equivalence class of atlases whose transition functions are translations; such translation surfaces naturally occur in Teichmüller theory, polygonal billards and the study of interval exchange maps. In the present paper, the topology and geometry of the moduli space of immersions of ellipses into a translation surface is studied. The frontier of this moduli space is naturally stratified by the number of cone points (with an angle equal to an integer multiple of \(2\pi\)) that an ellipse meets, and the stratum of ellipses meeting exactly three cone points is naturally a two dimensional polygonal cell complex. ``We show that the topology of this cell complex together with the eccentricity and direction of each of its vertices determines the translation surface up to homothety. As a corollary, we characterize the Veech group of the tranlation surface in terms of automorphisms of this polygonal cell complex.''