Étale cohomological stability of the moduli space of stable elliptic surfaces

Abstract: We compute the (stable) \'etale cohomology of $\mathrm{Hom}{n}(C, \mathcal{P}(\vec{\lambda}))$, the moduli stack of degree $n$ morphisms from a smooth projective curve $C$ to the weighted projective stack $\mathcal{P}(\vec{\lambda})$, the latter being a stacky quotient defined by $\mathcal{P}(\vec{\lambda}) := \left[\mathbb{A}^N-{0}/\mathbb{G}_m\right]$, where $\mathbb{G}_m$ acts by weights $\vec{\lambda} = (\lambda_0, \cdots, \lambda_N) \in \mathbb{Z}^N{+}$. Our key ingredient is formulating and proving the \'etale cohomological descent over the category $\Delta S$, the symmetric (semi)simplicial category. An immediate arithmetic consequence is the resolution of the geometric Batyrev--Manin type conjecture for weighted projective stacks over global function fields. Along the way, we also analyze the intersection theory on weighted projectivizations of vector bundles on smooth Deligne-Mumford stacks.