Moduli spaces of punctured Poincaré disks

Abstract

The Tamari lattice and the associahedron provide methods of measuring associativity on a line. The real moduli space of marked curves captures the space of such associativity. We consider a natural generalization by considering the moduli space of marked particles on the Poincaré disk, extending Tamari's notion of associativity based on nesting. A geometric and combinatorial construction of this space is provided, which appears in Kontsevich's deformation quantization, Voronov's swiss-cheese operad, and Kajiura and Stasheff's open-closed string theory.

21 pages, 18 figures