Tessellations of Moduli Spaces and the Mosaic Operad

Abstract

We construct a new (cyclic) operad of `mosaics' defined by polygons with marked diagonals. Its underlying (aspherical) spaces are the sets of real points of the moduli space of punctured Riemann spheres, which are naturally tiled by Stasheff associahedra. We (combinatorially) describe them as iterated blow-ups and show that their fundamental groups form an operad with similarities to the operad of braid groups.

24 pages, 26 figures, LaTex; updated and improved content (1999)