IMMERSIONS AND THE SPACE OF ALL TRANSLATION STRUCTURES

Abstract. A translation structure on a surface is an atlas of charts to the plane so that the transition functions are translations. We allow our surfaces to be non-compact and infinite genus. We endow the space of all pointed surfaces equipped with a translation structure with a topology, which we call the immersive topology because it is related to the manner in which disks can be immersed into such a surface. We prove that a number of operations typically done to translation surfaces are continuous with respect to the topology. We show that the topology is Hausdorff, and that the collection of surfaces with a fixed lower bound on the injectivity radius at the basepoint is compact. 1