Rational maps as Schwarzian primitives

Abstract

We study necessary and sufficient conditions for a meromorphic quadratic differential with prescribed poles to be the Schwarzian derivative of a rational map. We give geometric interpretations of these conditions. We also study the pole-dependency of these Schwarzian derivatives. We show that, in the cubic case, the analytic dependency fails precisely when the poles are displaced at the vertices of a regular ideal tetrahedron of the hyperbolic 3-ball.