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

On torsion in finitely presented groups

We give a uniform construction that, on input of a recursive presentation $P$ of a group, outputs a recursive presentation of a torsion-free group, isomorphic to $P$ whenever $P$ is itself torsion-free. We use this to re-obtain a known result, the existence of a universal finitely presented torsion-free group; one into which all finitely presented torsion-free groups embed. We apply our techniques to show that recognising embeddability of finitely presented groups is $\Pi^{0}_{2}$-hard, $\Sigma^{0}_{2}$-hard, and lies in $\Sigma^{0}_{3}$. We also show that the sets of orders of torsion elements of finitely presented groups are precisely the $\Sigma^{0}_{2}$ sets which are closed under taking factors.Comment: 11 pages. This is the version submitted for publicatio

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