Étale cohomological stability of the moduli space of stable elliptic surfaces

Abstract

We compute the (stable) étale cohomology of $\mathrm{Hom}_{n}(C, \mathcal{P}(\vecλ))$, the moduli stack of degree $n$ morphisms from a smooth projective curve $C$ to the weighted projective stack $\mathcal{P}(\vecλ)$, the latter being a stacky quotient defined by $\mathcal{P}(\vecλ) := \left[\mathbb{A}^N-\{0\}/\mathbb{G}_m\right]$, where $\mathbb{G}_m$ acts by weights $\vecλ = (λ_0, \cdots, λ_N) \in \mathbb{Z}^N_{+}$. Our key ingredient is formulating and proving the étale cohomological descent over the category $ΔS$, the symmetric (semi)simplicial category. An immediate arithmetic consequence is the resolution of the geometric Batyrev--Manin type conjecture for weighted projective stacks over global function fields. Along the way, we also analyze the intersection theory on weighted projectivizations of vector bundles on smooth Deligne-Mumford stacks.