Meromorphic differentials and Teichmüller space

Abstract

In the late 1980s, Nigel Hitchin and Michael Wolf independently discovered a parametrization of the Teichmüller space of a compact surface by holomorphic quadratic differentials. In this talk, I will describe a generalization of their result where one replaces holomorphic differentials by meromorphic differentials. I will explain how this fits into an even more general story involving spaces of stability conditions and cluster varieties.