Isomonodromic tau function on the space of admissible covers (Q531811)

The space of admissible covers is a natural compactification of the Hurwitz space of smooth branched covers of the complex projective line \(\mathbb P^1\), or, equivalently, meromorphic functions on complex algebraic curves, of given degree and genus. This space was first introduced by \textit{J. Harris} and \textit{D. Mumford} [Invent. Math. 67, 23--86 (1982; Zbl 0506.14016)] and appeared to be quite useful in computing the Kodaira dimension of the moduli space of stable curves. Lately this space has attracted a major attention, mainly in connection with Gromov-Witten theory, quantum cohomology, Hurwitz numbers, Hodge integrals, etc. On the other hand, Hurwitz spaces appear naturally in relationship with the Rie\-mann-Hilbert problem, and carry a natural Frobenius structure. The tau function for the corresponding isomonodromic deformations can be written explicitly in terms of the theta function and the prime form on the covering complex curve. In this paper, the authors study the asymptotic behavior of the isomonodromic tau function near the boundary of the Hurwitz space given by nodal admissible covers, and explicitly compute its divisor. More precisely, a power of the tau function corrected by a power of the Vandermonde determinant of the critical values of the branched cover descends to a holomorphic section of (the pullback of) the Hodge bundle on the Hurwitz space. Moreover this section extends to a meromorphic section of the Hodge bundle on the compactification of the Hurwitz space by admissible covers. This allows to express (the pullback of) the Hodge class on the space of admissible covers as a linear combination of boundary divisors (in small genera this also gives a non-trivial relation between the boundary divisors).