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Low-degree Hurwitz stacks in the Grothendieck ring

Part of: Families, fibrations Birational geometry Arithmetic problems. Diophantine geometry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2024

Aaron Landesman Open the ORCID record for Aaron Landesman [Opens in a new window] ,
Ravi Vakil Open the ORCID record for Ravi Vakil [Opens in a new window]  and
Melanie Matchett Wood Open the ORCID record for Melanie Matchett Wood [Opens in a new window]
Aaron Landesman
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA landesman@math.harvard.edu
Ravi Vakil
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA rvakil@stanford.edu
Melanie Matchett Wood
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA mmwood@math.harvard.edu
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Abstract

For $2 \leq d \leq 5$, we show that the class of the Hurwitz space of smooth degree $d$, genus $g$ covers of $\mathbb {P}^1$ stabilizes in the Grothendieck ring of stacks as $g \to \infty$, and we give a formula for the limit. We also verify this stabilization when one imposes ramification conditions on the covers, and obtain a particularly simple answer for this limit when one restricts to simply branched covers.

Keywords

motivic statisticsGrothendieck ringHurwitz spacesCasnati--Ekedahl parameterizations

MSC classification

Primary: 14G99: None of the above, but in this section
Secondary: 14D23: Stacks and moduli problems 14E20: Coverings

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Compositio Mathematica , Volume 160 , Issue 8 , August 2024 , pp. 1784 - 1849
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Copyright
© 2024 The Author(s). The publishing rights in this article are licensed to Foundation Compositio Mathematica under an exclusive licence

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Footnotes

With an appendix by Aaron Landesman and Federico Scavia

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