The moduli space of cactus flower curves and the virtual cactus group

TL;DR

This paper introduces and studies the moduli spaces of cactus flower curves, revealing their topological properties and connections to virtual symmetric and cactus groups, with implications for understanding degenerations of classical moduli spaces.

Contribution

It constructs new compactifications of moduli spaces of points on the line, models their real loci, and identifies their fundamental groups with virtual symmetric and cactus groups.

Findings

Spaces are aspherical with known fundamental groups.

Models for real loci are explicitly described.

Degeneration links affine and virtual cactus groups.

Abstract

The space $ \ft_n = \C^n/\C $ of $n$ points on the line modulo translation has a natural compactification $ \overline \ft_n $ as a matroid Schubert variety. In this space, pairwise distances between points can be infinite; it is natural to imagine points at infinite distance from each other as living on different projective lines. We call such a configuration of points a ``flower curve'', since we picture the projective lines joined into a flower. Within $ \ft_n $, we have the space $ F_n = \C^n \setminus \Delta / \C $ of $ n$ distinct points. We introduce a natural compatification $ \overline F_n $ along with a map $ \overline F_n \rightarrow \overline \ft_n $, whose fibres are products of genus 0 Deligne-Mumford spaces. We show that both $\overline \ft_n$ and $\overline F_n$, are special fibers of $1$-parameter families whose generic fibers are, respectively, Losev-Manin and Deligne-Mumford moduli spaces of stable genus $0$ curves with $n+2$ marked points. We find combinatorial models for the real loci $ \overline \ft_n(\BR) $ and $ \overline F_n(\BR) $. Using these models, we prove that these spaces are aspherical and that their equivariant fundamental groups are the virtual symmetric group and the virtual cactus groups, respectively. The degeneration of a twisted real form of the Deligne-Mumford space to $\overline F_n(\mathbb{R})$ gives rise to a natural homomorphism from the affine cactus group to the virtual cactus group.