The topology and geometry of random square-tiled surfaces

Abstract

A square-tiled surface (STS) is a branched cover of the standard square torus with branching over exactly one point. In this paper we consider a randomizing model for STSs and generalizations to branched covers of other simple translation surfaces which we call polygon-tiled surfaces. We obtain a local central limit theorem for the genus and subsequently obtain that the distribution of the genus is asymptotically normal. We also study holonomy vectors (Euclidean displacement vectors between cone points) on a random STS. We show that asymptotically almost surely the set of holonomy vectors of a random STS contains the set of primitive vectors of $${\mathbb {Z}}^2$$ and with probability approaching 1/e, these sets are equal.