Enumeration of meanders and Masur-Veech volumes

DOI10.1017/FMP.2020.2zbMATH Open1436.32055arXiv1705.05190OpenAlexW3100845877MaRDI QIDQ5221485FDOQ5221485

Authors: Vincent Delecroix, Elise Goujard, Peter Zograf, Anton Zorich 

Publication date: 26 March 2020

Published in: Forum of Mathematics, Pi (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: A meander is a topological configuration of a line and a simple closed curve in the plane (or a pair of simple closed curves on the 2-sphere) intersecting transversally. Meanders can be traced back to H. Poincar'e and naturally appear in various areas of mathematics, theoretical physics and computational biology (in particular, they provide a model of polymer folding). Enumeration of meanders is an important open problem. The number of meanders with 2N crossings grows exponentially when N grows, but the longstanding problem on the precise asymptotics is still out of reach. We show that the situation becomes more tractable if one additionally fixes the topological type (or the total number of minimal arcs) of a meander. Then we are able to derive simple asymptotic formulas for the numbers of meanders as N tends to infinity. We also compute the asymptotic probability of getting a simple closed curve on a sphere by identifying the endpoints of two arc systems (one on each of the two hemispheres) along the common equator. The new tools we bring to bear are based on interpretation of meanders as square-tiled surfaces with one horizontal and one vertical cylinders. The proofs combine recent results on Masur-Veech volumes of the moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials in genus zero with our new observation that horizontal and vertical separatrix diagrams of integer quadratic differentials are asymptotically uncorrelated. The additional combinatorial constraints we impose in this article yield explicit polynomial asymptotics.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05190

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zbMATH Keywords

flat surfacesmeandersMasur-Veech volumes

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Enumeration in graph theory (05C30) Moduli of Riemann surfaces, Teichmüller theory (complex-analytic aspects in several variables) (32G15) General geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds (57M50) Differentials on Riemann surfaces (30F30)

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