Logarithmic tautological rings of the moduli spaces of curves

Abstract

We define the logarithmic tautological rings of the moduli spaces of Deligne-Mumford stable curves (together with a set of additive generators lifting the decorated strata classes of the standard tautological rings). While these algebras are infinite dimensional, a connection to polyhedral combinatorics via a new theory of homological piecewise polynomials allows an effective study. A complete calculation is given in genus 0 via the algebra of piecewise polynomials on the cone stack of the associated Artin fan (lifting Keel's presentation of the Chow ring of $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{0,n}$). Counterexamples to the simplest generalizations in genus 1 are presented. We show, however, that the structure of the log tautological rings is determined by the complete knowledge of all relations in the standard tautological rings of the moduli spaces of curves. In particular, Pixton's conjecture concerning relations in the standard tautological rings lifts to a complete conjecture for relations in the log tautological rings of the moduli spaces of curves. Several open questions are discussed. We develop the entire theory of logarithmic tautological classes in the context of arbitrary smooth normal crossings pairs $(X,D)$ with explicit formulas for intersection products. As a special case, we give an explicit set of additive generators of the full logarithmic Chow ring of $(X,D)$ in terms of Chow classes on the strata of $X$ and piecewise polynomials on the cone stack.