Stable twisted curves and their r-spin structures

The object of this paper is the notion of r-spin structure: a line bundle whose r-th power is isomorphic to the canonical bundle. Over the moduli functor M_g of smooth genus-$g$ curves, $r$-spin structures form a finite torsor under the group of r-torsion line bundles. Over the moduli functor Mbar_g of stable curves, r-spin structures form an 'etale stack, but the finiteness and the torsor structure are lost. In the present work, we show how this bad picture can be definitely improved simply by placing the problem in the category of Abramovich and Vistoli's twisted curves. First, we find that within such category there exist several different compactifications of M_g; each one corresponds to a different multiindex \ell=(l0,l1,...) identifying a notion of stability: \ell-stability. Then, we determine the suitable choices of \ell for which r-spin structures form a finite torsor over the moduli of \ell-stable curves.Comment: 44 pages, revised version, to appear in Annales de l'Institut Fourie

LG/CY correspondence: the state space isomorphism

We prove the classical mirror symmetry conjecture for the mirror pairs constructed by Berglund, H\"ubsch, and Krawitz. Our main tool is a cohomological LG/CY correspondence which provides a degree-preserving isomorphism between the cohomology of finite quotients of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces inside a weighted projective space and the Fan-Jarvis-Ruan-Witten state space of the associated Landau-Ginzburg singularity theory.Comment: 37 pages, 9 figure

Singularities of the moduli space of level curves

We describe the singular locus of the compactification of the moduli space $R_{g,l}$ of curves of genus $g$ paired with an $l$-torsion point in their Jacobian. Generalising previous work for $l\le 2$, we also describe the sublocus of noncanonical singularities for any positive integer $l$. For $g\ge 4$ and $l=3,4, 6$, this allows us to provide a lifting result on pluricanonical forms playing an essential role in the computation of the Kodaira dimension of $R_{g,l}$: for those values of $l$, every pluricanonical form on the smooth locus of the moduli space extends to a desingularisation of the compactified moduli space.Comment: 37 pages, 9 figures, to appear in J Eur Math So

Twisted Gromov-Witten r-spin potential and Givental's quantization

The universal curve p:C->\Mbar over the moduli space \Mbar of stable r-spin maps to a target K\"ahler manifold X carries a universal spinor bundle L->C. Therefore the moduli space \Mbar itself carries a natural K-theory class Rp_*L. We introduce a twisted r-spin Gromov-Witten potential of X enriched with Chern characters of Rp_*L. We show that the twisted potential can be reconstructed from the ordinary r-spin Gromov-Witten potential of X via an operator that assumes a particularly simple form in Givental's quantization formalism.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure