Weierstrass points on cyclic covers of the projective line

Abstract:

We are interested in cyclic covers of the projective line which are totally ramified at all of their branch points. We begin with curves given by an equation of the form $y^{n}=f(x)$, where $f$ is a polynomial of degree $d$. Under a mild hypothesis, it is easy to see that all of the branch points must be Weierstrass points. Our main problem is to find the total Weierstrass weight of these points, $BW$. We obtain a lower bound for $BW$, which we show is exact if $n$ and $d$ are relatively prime. As a fraction of the total Weierstrass weight of all points on the curve, we get the following particularly nice asymptotic formula (as well as an interesting exact formula): \begin{equation*} \lim _{d\to \infty }\frac {BW}{g^{3}-g}=\frac {n+1}{3(n-1)^{2}}, \end{equation*} where $g$ is the genus of the curve. In the case that $n=3$ (cyclic trigonal curves), we are able to show in most cases that for sufficiently large primes $p$, the branch points and the non-branch Weierstrass points remain distinct modulo $p$.