\(\Omega\)-admissible theory. II: Deligne pairings over moduli spaces of punctured Riemann surfaces (Q5947131)

In his previous paper ``\(\Omega\)-admissible theory'' [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., III. Ser. 79, No. 3, 481--510 (1999; Zbl 1036.14013)], the author had generalized the classical Arakelov-Faltings intersection theory on regular arithmetic surfaces. In the last section of that foregoing paper, he had begun to extend his general approach to singular arithmetic surfaces. The paper under review is, in a way, a continuation of these investigations, although it actually appears as being essentially independent and of a different flavour. Namely, an \(\omega\)-admissible intersection theory on an arithmetic surface \(X\) depended, so far, on the fixing of a volume form on the related Riemann surface \(X(\mathbb{C})\). Now, when dealing with singular surfaces, the natural question arises of whether the analytic framework of Arakelov theory can be extended to non-compact Riemann surfaces and singular metrics on them. The first part of the paper under review is devoted to exactly this problem, which comprises at least two major difficulties. First, as for establishing intersection products, general singular metrics may have too complicated singularities. Second, as for a suitable generalization of the Faltings metric on the determinant of cohomology to non-compact Riemann surfaces, Quillen's construction via the Laplace operator fails to work because the spectrum of the latter will be continuous in the noncompact case, already so in the ``mildest'' case of a punctured Riemann surface. Nevertheless, the author tackles that special case of punctured Riemann surfaces successfully, in that he manages to construct a Faltings-type metric on the determinant of cohomology recursively. Then, by proving a number of so-called mean value lemmas, which explicitly exhibit how metrized Deligne pairings for such \(\omega\)-admissible metrized line bundles depend on the author's metric form \(\omega\), a generalization of the classical Deligne-Riemann-Roch metric isomorphism to punctured Riemann surfaces is derived. This major result is certainly the highlight of Part I of the present paper. Part II deals with the Deligne-Mumford-Knudsen compactification of the moduli stack of stable \(N\)-pointed algebraic curves of genus \(g\). The author constructs several natural line bundles over those stacks, among which the well-known Weil-Petersson, Takhtajan-Zograf, and logarithmic Mumford line bundles occur just as naturally, and then he uses his generalized Deligne-Riemann-Roch isometry (proved in Part I of the present paper) to derive some very fundamental relations among these line bundles. These relations seem to be crucial for a better understanding of the enumerative geometry of the corresponding moduli spaces, and they shed some new light on earlier related results towards the structure of their Chow rings obtained by Mumford, Cornalba-Harris, Xiao, Wolpert, and others in the past. In the last section of Part II, especially the results of \textit{L. A. Takhtajan} and \textit{P. G. Zograf} [Commun. Math. Phys. 137, 399--426 (1991; Zbl 0725.58043)] are substantially refined. In fact, the author gives an affirmative answer to the formerly open problem of whether the Takhtajan-Zograf metric is algebraic.