Connected components of strata of abelian differentials over Teichmüller space (Q784199)

The author studies connected components of the strata of holomorphic abelian differentials on marked Riemann surfaces with prescribed degrees of zeros. He proves that there are several such connected components, which are distinguished by roots of the cotangent bundle of the surface. He also characterizes the images of the fundamental groups of strata inside of the mapping class group. The main techniques he uses are those of \(r\)-spin structures (\(r\)-th roots of the tangent bundle), mod \(r\) winding numbers and an analogue of the Euclidean algorithm which holds for mapping class groups and systems of simple closed curves.