Metrics with four conic singularities and spherical quadrilaterals

Abstract

A spherical quadrilateral is a bordered surface homeomorphic to a closed disk, with four distinguished boundary points called corners, equipped with a Riemannian metric of constant curvature 1, except at the corners, and such that the boundary arcs between the corners are geodesic. We discuss the problem of classification of these quadrilaterals and perform the classification up to isometry in the case that two angles at the corners are multiples of π. The problem is equivalent to classification of Heun's equations with real parameters and unitary monodromy.