Moduli space theory for complete, constant <i>Q</i>-curvature metrics on finitely punctured spheres

Abstract We study constant Q -curvature metrics conformal to the the round metric on the sphere with finitely many point singularities. We show that the moduli space of solutions with finitely many punctures in fixed positions, equipped with the Gromov–Hausdorff topology, has the local structure of a real algebraic variety with formal dimension equal to the number of the punctures. If a nondegeneracy hypothesis holds, we show that a neighbourhood in the moduli spaces is actually a smooth, real-analytic manifold of the expected dimension. We also construct a geometrically natural set of parameters, construct a symplectic structure on this parameter space and show that in the smooth case a small neighbourhood of the moduli space embeds as a Lagrangian submanifold in the parameter space. We remark that our construction of the symplectic structure is quite different from the one in the scalar curvature setting, due to the fact that the associated partial differential equation is fourth-order rather than second-order.