Square-tiled surfaces of fixed combinatorial type: equidistribution, counting, volumes of the ambient strata

Abstract

We prove that square-tiled surfaces having fixed combinatorics of horizontal cylinder decomposition and tiled with smaller and smaller squares become asymptotically equidistributed in any ambient linear $GL(\mathbb R)$-invariant suborbifold defined over $\mathbb Q$ in the moduli space of Abelian differentials. Moreover, we prove that the combinatorics of the horizontal and of the vertical decompositions are asymptotically uncorrelated. As a consequence, we prove the existence of an asymptotic distribution for the combinatorics of a "random" interval exchange transformation with integer lengths. We compute explicitly the absolute contribution of square-tiled surfaces having a single horizontal cylinder to the Masur-Veech volume of any ambient stratum of Abelian differentials. The resulting count is particularly simple and efficient in the large genus asymptotics. We conjecture that the corresponding relative contribution is asymptotically of the order $1/d$, where $d$ is the dimension of the stratum, and prove that this conjecture is equivalent to the long-standing conjecture on the large genus asymptotics of the Masur-Veech volumes. We prove, in particular, that the recent results of Chen, Möller and Zagier imply that the conjecture holds for the principal stratum of Abelian differentials as the genus tends to infinity. Our result on random interval exchanges with integer lengths allows to make empirical computation of the probability to get a $1$-cylinder pillowcase cover taking a "random" one in a given stratum. We use this technique to derive the approximate values of the Masur-Veech volumes of strata of quadratic differentials of all small dimensions.