Stable degenerations of surfaces isogenous to a product of curves

Abstract

We use the moduli space of stable curves to determine the stable (in the sense of Kollár-Shepherd-Barron) degenerations of surfaces isogenous to a product of stable curves. A recent family of examples of Catanese show that the moduli space of such smooth surfaces may have two components. The main result of this note is that these components do not meet in the stable compactification. To the best of my knowledge this gives the first example of a moduli space of stable surfaces with multiple connected components parameterizing diffeomorphic smooth surfaces. Comments are appreciated.