A monodromy graph approach to the piecewise polynomiality of simple, monotone and Grothendieck dessins d'enfants double Hurwitz numbers (1703.05590v4)

Abstract: Hurwitz numbers count genus $g$, degree $d$ covers of the complex projective line with fixed branched locus and fixed ramification data. An equivalent description is given by factorisations in the symmetric group. Simple double Hurwitz numbers are a class of Hurwitz-type counts of specific interest. In recent years a related counting problem in the context of random matrix theory was introduced as so-called monotone Hurwitz numbers. These can be viewed as a desymmetrised version of the Hurwitz-problem. A combinatorial interpolation between simple and monotone double Hurwitz numbers was introduced as mixed double Hurwitz numbers and it was proved that these objects are piecewise polynomial in a certain sense. Moreover, the notion of strictly monotone Hurwitz numbers has risen interest as it is equivalent to a certain Grothendieck dessins d'enfant count. In this paper, we introduce a combinatorial interpolation between simple, monotone and strictly monotone double Hurwitz numbers as \textit{triply interpolated Hurwitz numbers}. Our aim is twofold: Using a connection between triply interpolated Hurwitz numbers and tropical covers in terms of so-called monodromy graphs, we give algorithms to compute the polynomials for triply interpolated Hurwitz numbers in all genera using Erhart theory. We further use this approach to study the wall-crossing behaviour of triply interpolated Hurwitz numbers in genus $0$ in terms of related Hurwitz-type counts. All those results specialise to the extremal cases of simple, monotone and Grothendieck dessins d'enfants Hurwitz numbers.