Quivers with potentials associated to triangulated surfaces, Part III: tagged triangulations and cluster monomials

Abstract: To each tagged triangulation of a surface with marked points and non-empty boundary we associate a quiver with potential, in such a way that whenever we apply a flip to a tagged triangulation, the Jacobian algebra of the QP associated to the resulting tagged triangulation is isomorphic to the Jacobian algebra of the QP obtained by mutating the QP of the original one. Furthermore, we show that any two tagged triangulations are related by a sequence of flips compatible with QP-mutation. We also prove that for each of the QPs constructed, the ideal of the non-completed path algebra generated by the cyclic derivatives is admissible and the corresponding quotient is isomorphic to the Jacobian algebra. These results, which generalize some of the second author's previous work for ideal triangulations, are then applied to prove properties of cluster monomials, like linear independence, in the cluster algebra associated to the given surface by Fomin-Shapiro-Thurston (with an arbitrary system of coefficients).