Characterizations of lattice surfaces

Abstract

We answer a question of Vorobets by showing that the lattice property for flat surfaces is equivalent to the existence of a positive lower bound for the areas of affine triangles. We show that the set of affine equivalence classes of lattice surfaces with a fixed positive lower bound for the areas of triangles is finite and we obtain explicit bounds on its cardinality. We deduce several other characterizations of the lattice property.