Chewing gums, snakes and candle cakes

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Facciotti, Benedetta, Mazzocco, Marta, Nikolaev, Nikita
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Facciotti, Benedetta
Mazzocco, Marta
Nikolaev, Nikita
author_facet Facciotti, Benedetta
Mazzocco, Marta
Nikolaev, Nikita
contents The aim of these lecture notes, based on lectures given by the second author at the CIME school in Cetraro, is to illustrate a range of ideas surrounding higher Teichmuller spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked boundaries through explicit and computationally tractable examples. After reviewing the classical Teichmuller space of hyperbolic Riemann surfaces with boundary and its combinatorial description in terms of Thurston shear coordinates on a fat-graph, we explain how the bordered cusped Teichmuller space arises as a confluent limit when two boundary components in the Riemann surface collide via the so-called chewing-gum move giving rise to a candle cake. We then revisit these constructions from the Fock-Goncharov perspective, explaining snake calculus for transport matrices in PSL_n(R) and explain how the chewing gum move is the inverse of amalgamation. Rather than focusing on formal proofs, our goal is to illustrate the underlying theorems and constructions in a concrete and intuitive way.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12572
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chewing gums, snakes and candle cakes
Facciotti, Benedetta
Mazzocco, Marta
Nikolaev, Nikita
Geometric Topology
Mathematical Physics
30F60, 32G15, 57K20, 14H10, 14M35
The aim of these lecture notes, based on lectures given by the second author at the CIME school in Cetraro, is to illustrate a range of ideas surrounding higher Teichmuller spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked boundaries through explicit and computationally tractable examples. After reviewing the classical Teichmuller space of hyperbolic Riemann surfaces with boundary and its combinatorial description in terms of Thurston shear coordinates on a fat-graph, we explain how the bordered cusped Teichmuller space arises as a confluent limit when two boundary components in the Riemann surface collide via the so-called chewing-gum move giving rise to a candle cake. We then revisit these constructions from the Fock-Goncharov perspective, explaining snake calculus for transport matrices in PSL_n(R) and explain how the chewing gum move is the inverse of amalgamation. Rather than focusing on formal proofs, our goal is to illustrate the underlying theorems and constructions in a concrete and intuitive way.
title Chewing gums, snakes and candle cakes
topic Geometric Topology
Mathematical Physics
30F60, 32G15, 57K20, 14H10, 14M35
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12572