The stability space of compactified universal Jacobians

Abstract: In this paper we describe compactified universal Jacobians, i.e. compactifications of the moduli space of line bundles on smooth curves obtained as moduli spaces of rank 1 torsion-free sheaves on stable curves, using an approach due to Oda-Seshadri. We focus on the combinatorics of the stability conditions used to define compactified universal Jacobians. We explicitly describe an affine space, the stability space, with a decomposition into polytopes such that each polytope corresponds to a proper Deligne-Mumford stack that compactifies the moduli space of line bundles. We apply this description to describe the set of isomorphism classes of compactified universal Jacobians (answering a question of Melo), and to resolve the indeterminacy of the Abel-Jacobi sections (addressing a problem raised by Grushevsky-Zakharov).