Horizon saddle connections, quasi-Hopf surfaces and Veech groups of dilation surfaces

Abstract

Dilation surfaces are generalizations of translation surfaces where the geometric structure is modelled on the complex plane up to affine maps whose linear part is real. They are the geometric framework to study suspensions of affine interval exchange maps. However, though the $SL(2,\mathbb {R})$-action is ergodic in connected components of strata of translation surfaces, there may be mutually disjoint $SL(2,\mathbb {R})$-invariant open subsets in components of dilation surfaces. A first distinction is between triangulable and non-triangulable dilation surfaces. For non-triangulable surfaces, the action of $SL(2,\mathbb {R})$ is somewhat trivial so the study can be focused on the space of triangulable dilation surfaces. In this paper, we introduce the notion of horizon saddle connections in order to refine the distinction between triangulable and non-triangulable dilation surfaces. We also introduce the family of quasi-Hopf surfaces that can be triangulable but display the same trivial behavior as non-triangulable surfaces. We prove that existence of horizon saddle connections drastically restricts the Veech group a dilation surface can have.