The Asymptotic Statistics of Random Covering Surfaces

Abstract

Let $\Gamma _{g}$ be the fundamental group of a closed connected orientable surface of genus $g\geq 2$ . We develop a new method for integrating over the representation space $\mathbb {X}_{g,n}=\mathrm {Hom}(\Gamma _{g},S_{n})$ , where $S_{n}$ is the symmetric group of permutations of $\{1,\ldots ,n\}$ . Equivalently, this is the space of all vertex-labeled, n-sheeted covering spaces of the closed surface of genus g.

Keywords

• 20C15
• 20B30
• 20P05
• 20F34
• 20F65
• 20F70
• 60B15