A boundary divisor in the moduli space of stable quintic surfaces

Abstract

We give a bound on which singularities may appear on Koll\'ar--Shepherd-Barron--Alexeev stable surfaces for a wide range of topological invariants and use this result to describe all stable numerical quintic surfaces (KSBA-stable surfaces with $K^2=\chi=5$) whose unique non Du Val singularity is a Wahl singularity. We then extend the deformation theory of Horikawa to the log setting in order to describe the boundary divisor of the moduli space $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{5,5}$ corresponding to these surfaces. Quintic surfaces are the simplest examples of surfaces of general type and the question of describing their moduli is a long-standing question in algebraic geometry.