Isomonodromic tau function on the space of admissible covers

Abstract

The isomonodromic tau function of the Fuchsian differential equations associated to Frobenius structures on Hurwitz spaces can be viewed as a section of a line bundle on the space of admissible covers. We study the asymptotic behavior of the tau function near the boundary of this space and compute its divisor. This yields an explicit formula for the pullback of the Hodge class to the space of admissible covers in terms of the classes of compactification divisors.