Mirzakhani's recursion relations, Virasoro constraints and the KdV hierarchy

Abstract

We present in this paper a differential version of Mirzakhani's recursion relation for the Weil-Petersson volumes of the moduli spaces of bordered Riemann surfaces. We discover that the differential relation, which is equivalent to the original integral formula of Mirzakhani, is a Virasoro constraint condition on a generating function for these volumes. We also show that the generating function for psi and kappa_1 intersections on the moduli space of stable algebraic curves is a 1-parameter solution to the KdV hierarchy. It recovers the Witten-Kontsevich generating function when the parameter is set to be 0.

21 pages, 3 figures; v3. new introduction, minor revisions

References in corpus (1)

• A simple proof of Witten conjecture through localization

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Hurwitz numbers, matrix models and enumerative geometry
• The Weil-Petersson metric geometry
• Lectures and notes: Mirzakhani's volume recursion and approach for the Witten-Kontsevich theorem on moduli tautological intersection numbers
• An effective recursion formula for computing intersection numbers
• Integration on moduli spaces of stable curves through localization