Dyck's surfaces, systoles, and capacities

Abstract

We prove an optimal systolic inequality for nonpositively curved Dyck's surfaces. The extremal surface is flat with eight conical singularities, six of angle theta and two of angle 9pi - theta, for a suitable theta with cos(theta) in Q(sqrt{19}). Relying on some delicate capacity estimates, we also show that the extremal surface is not conformally equivalent to the hyperbolic surface with maximal systole, yielding a first example of systolic extremality with this behavior.