Dessins d'Enfants of Trigonal Curves

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on properties of dessins d'enfants associated to trigonal curves. Degtyarev studied dessins d'enfants to compute braid monodromies and fundamental groups of trigonal curves using their combinatorial data. We first classify all possible combinatorial data that can occur for trigonal curves of low degree, as well as bounds on the number of possibilities for all degree. We also study deformations of trigonal curves and corresponding deformations of their dessins. Of special interest to Degtyarev was the case when the dessins are maximal. We give a sufficient condition for a trigonal curve to be deformable to one that is maximal.