Tropical methods in Hurwitz-Brill-Noether theory

Partitions; congruences and congruential restrictions (11P83) Special divisors on curves (gonality, Brill-Noether theory) (14H51) Applications of tropical geometry (14T90)

Abstract: Splitting type loci are the natural generalizations of Brill-Noether varieties for curves with a distinguished map to the projective line. We give a tropical proof of a theorem of H. Larson, showing that splitting type loci have the expected dimension for general elements of the Hurwitz space. Our proof uses an explicit description of splitting type loci on a certain family of tropical curves. We further show that these tropical splitting type loci are connected in codimension one, and describe an algorithm for computing their cardinality when they are zero-dimensional. We provide a conjecture for the numerical class of splitting type loci, which we confirm in a number of cases.

Review text

Let \((C,\pi)\) be a curve in the Hurwitz space \(\mathcal{H}_{g,k}\) parametrizing degree \(k\) branched covers of \(\mathbb{P}^1\) of genus \(g\), with \(k<\lfloor \frac{g+3}{2}\rfloor\), and consider the splitting type locus \(W^{\mu}(C)\) parametrizing line bundles of splitting type \(\mu=(\mu_1,\dots,\mu_k).\) In this work the authors prove that if \(g\geq |\mu|=\sum_{i<j}\max\{0,\mu_j-\mu_i-1\}\), then \(\dim W^{\mu}(C)=g-|\mu|\), otherwise \(W^{\mu}(C)\) is empty. This result was already proved in [\textit{H. K. Larson}, Invent. Math. 224, No. 3, 767--790 (2021; Zbl 1477.14014)], the innovation here is the tropical approach applied in the proof of this statement: in particular they construct an analogous of the splitting type locus for \(k\)-gonal chains of loops, which are graphs arising as skeletons of \(k\)-gonal curves in the Hurwitz space over nonarchimedean fields. Let \(\Gamma\) be a \(k\)-gonal chain of loops of genus \(g\), \(W^{\mu}(\Gamma)\) its splitting type locus of type \(\mu\), and \(\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\) its closure. In order to prove the same result stated above but for these splitting loci the authors give a description of them as a union of tori indexed by rectangular tableaux verifying \(k\)-uniform displacement, so they get that, that if \(g\geq |\mu|=\sum_{i<j}\max\{0,\mu_j-\mu_i-1\}\), then \(\dim\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}=g-|\mu|\), otherwise \(\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\) is empty. The key property used in the proof of the original statement for splitting loci of curves is that given a curve \(C\) of genus \(g\) and gonality \(k\) over a nonarchimedean field \(K\), \(\mathrm{Trop}(\overline{W^{\mu}(C)})\subset\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\), where \(\Gamma\) is the skeleton of \(C\). Applying a result from [\textit{W. Gubler}, Invent. Math. 169, No. 2, 321--376 (2007; Zbl 1153.14036)] which says that \(\dim\overline{W^{\mu}(C)}=\dim \mathrm{Trop}(\overline{W^{\mu}(C))}\), we have \(\dim\overline{W^{\mu}(C)}\leq \dim\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\), and then the authors prove that \(\dim \overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\leq g-|\mu |\), giving the result we wanted. Through the deep study of the splitting type loci of chain of loops, the authors were able to develop some other results and conjectures. They show that these \(\overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\) are connected in codimension 1 and they also compute the cardinality of zero-dimensional tropical splitting type loci. The first Conjecture (proved in \textit{E. Larson, H. Larson, I.Vogt}, Global Brill--Noether Theory over the Hurwitz Space, Preprint, \url{arXiv:2008.10765}]) deals with the numerical class of \(\overline{W^{\mu}(C)}\) in \(\mathrm{Pic}^{d(\mu)}(C)\), the second Conjecture deals with surjectivity of the tropicalization map \(\mathrm{Trop}:\overline{W^{\mu}(C)}\rightarrow \overline{W^{\mu}(\Gamma)}\), which is known to hold in several cases.

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