We describe the closure of the strata of Abelian differentials with prescribed type of zeros and poles, in the projectivized Hodge bundle over the Deligne–Mumford moduli space of stable curves with marked points. We provide an explicit characterization of pointed stable differentials in the boundary of the closure, both a complex analytic proof and a flat geometric proof for smoothing the boundary differentials, and numerous examples. The main new ingredient in our description is a global residue condition arising from a full order on the dual graph of a stable curve.

We investigate birational boundedness of Fano varieties and Fano fibrations. We establish an inductive step towards birational boundedness of Fano fibrations via conjectures related to bound- edness of Fano varieties and Fano fibrations. As corollaries, we provide approaches towards birational boundedness and boundedness of anti-canonical volumes of varieties of ε-Fano type. Furthermore, we show birational boundedness of 3-folds of ε-Fano type.

Let R be a non-discrete rank one valuation ring of characteristic p and let E be any discrete valuation ring, we prove the ring of E-Witt vectors over R has uncountable Krull dimension without assuming the axiom of existence of prime ideals for general commutative unitary rings.

This is the second of a sequence of papers proving the quantum invariance for ordinary flops over an arbitrary smooth base. In this paper, we complete the proof of the invariance of the big quantum rings under ordinary flops of splitting type. To achieve that, several new ingredients are introduced. One is a quantum Leray--Hirsch theorem for the local model (a certain toric bundle) which extends the quantum D module of Dubrovin connection on the base by a Picard--Fuchs system of the toric fibers. Nonsplit flops as well as further applications of the quantum Leray--Hirsch theorem will be discussed in subsequent papers. In particular, a quantum splitting principle is developed in Part III which reduces the general ordinary flops to the split case solved here.

We define tautological relations for the moduli space of stable maps to a target variety. Using the double ramification cycle formula for target varieties of Janda–Pandharipande–Pixton–Zvonkine, we construct non-trivial tautological relations parallel to Pixton’s double ramification cycle relations for the moduli of curves. Examples and applications are discussed.