The boundary of an affine invariant submanifold

Abstract

We study the boundary of an affine invariant submanifold of a stratum of translation surfaces in a partial compactification consisting of all finite area Abelian differentials over nodal Riemann surfaces, modulo zero area components. The main result is a formula for the tangent space to the boundary. We also prove finiteness results concerning cylinders, a partial converse to the Cylinder Deformation Theorem, and a result generalizing part of the Veech dichotomy.