Stable twisted curves and their \(r\)-spin structures (Q939593)

Let \(M_g\) be the moduli stack of smooth curves of genus \(g\). An \(r\)-spin structure is a line bundle \(L\) together with an isomorphism of the \(r\)-th power of \(L\) with the canonical line bundle. Over \(M_g\), the \(r\)-spin structures form a finite torsor under the group of \(r\)-torsion line bundles. The moduli stack \({\overline M}_g\) of stable curves is a natural compactification of \(M_g\). The nodal curves in its boundary can have smaller number of \(r\)-spin structures than the smooth ones, so the \(r\)-spin structures over \(\overline{M}_g\) do not form a finite torsor (only an étale stack). The authors consider other compactifications of \(M_g\) given by Abramovich and Vistoli using twisted curves and determine choices for which \(r\)-spin structures form a finite torsor over the compactification. The twisted curves (over algebraically closed fields) are stack theoretic curves whose smooth geometric locus is represented by a scheme and whose stabilizers at the nodes have finite orders. Given a multiindex \({\mathbf l}=(l_0,l_1,\dots l_{[g/2]})\), a twisted curve is \({\mathbf l}\)-stable if its stabilizers have order \(l_i\) on a node of type \(i\). Recall that a node is said to be of type \(0\) if it lies on only one component of the curve and it is of type \(i\geq 1\) if it lies on two components of genera \(i, g-i, i\leq g/2\). The authors show that the \({\mathbf l}\)-stable curves form a tame, proper, smooth, irreducible Deligne-Mumford stack \(M_g({\mathbf l})\supset M_g\) and any substack of the stack of twisted curves containing \(M_g\) is of this form. The stack \({\overline M}_g\) corresponds to \({\mathbf l}=(1,\dots,1)\) and there is a finite flat morphism \(M_g({\mathbf l}) \to {\overline M}_g\) which is an isomorphism over the dense open substack \(M_g\). They prove that the stack of \(r\)-torsion line bundles is a finite group stack if and only if \(r\) divides \(l_0\). The \(r\)-spin structures form a smooth Deligne-Mumford stack étale over \(M_g({\mathbf l})\). The authors prove that it is a finite group stack if \(2g-2 \in r{\mathbb{Z}}\) and is a finite torsor if and only if \(r\) divides \((2i-1)l_i\) for all \(i\). A generalization to the canonical bundle replaced by its \(k\) th power is also proved.