We study derived categories arising from quivers with potential associated to a decorated marked surface S_Delta, in the sense taken in a paper by Qiu. We prove two conjectures from Qiu’s paper in which, under a bijection between certain objects in these categories and certain arcs in S, the dimensions of morphisms between these objects equal the intersection numbers between the corresponding arcs.

We prove that any “finite-type” component of a stability space of a triangulated category is contractible. The motivating example of such a component is the stability space of the Calabi–Yau–N category D(Gamma_N Q) associated to an ADE Dynkin quiver. In addition to showing that this is contractible we prove that the braid group Br(Q) acts freely upon it by spherical twists, in particular that the spherical twist group Br(Gamma_N Q) is isomorphic to Br(Q). This generalises the result of Brav–Thomas for the N=2 case. Other classes of triangulated categories with finite-type components in their stability spaces include locally finite triangulated categories with finite-rank Grothendieck group and discrete derived categories of finite global dimension.

Universal extensions arise naturally in the Auslander bijections. For an abelian category having Auslander-Reiten duality, we exploit a bijection triangle, which involves the Auslander bijections, universal extensions and the Auslander-Reiten duality. Some consequences are given, in particular, a conjecture by Ringel is verified.