On the cohomology of strata of abelian differentials

Abstract: For g>2 we study the cohomology classes in the closure of a stratum of abelian differentials defined by the boundary strata of codimension one. As an application, we find an explicit stratification of the spin moduli space for an odd spin structure consisting of g-1 strata D_j of codimension j-1 such that D_j does not contain a complete subvariety for all j. We also recover some results of Koroktin and Zograf and of Chen using a unified topological approach.