Fractional Dehn twists and modular invariants

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a relationship between fractional Dehn twist coefficients of Riemann surface automorphisms and modular invariants of holomorphic families of algebraic curves. Specially, we give a characterization of pseudo-periodic maps with nontrivial fractional Dehn twist coefficients. We also obtain some uniform lower bounds of non-zero fractional Dehn twist coefficients.