The enumerative geometry of rth roots of line bundles is crucial in the theory of r-spin curves and occurs in the calculation of Gromov–Witten invariants of orbifolds. It requires the definition of the suitable compact moduli stack and the generalization of the standard techniques from the theory of moduli of stable curves. In a previous paper, we constructed a compact moduli stack by describing the notion of stability in the context of twisted curves. In this paper, by working with stable twisted curves, we extend Mumford’s formula for the Chern character of the Hodge bundle to the direct image of the universal rth root in K-theory.

We describe an equivalence between the notion of balanced twisted curve introduced by Abramovich and Vistoli, and a new notion of log twisted curve, which is a nodal curve equipped with some logarithmic data in the sense of Fontaine and Illusie. As applications of this equivalence, we construct a universal balanced twisted curve, prove that a balanced twisted curve over a general base scheme admits étale locally on the base a finite flat cover by a scheme, and also give a new construction of the moduli space of stable maps into a Deligne–Mumford stack and a new proof that it is bounded.