Schemes of modules over gentle algebras and laminations of surfaces

We study the affine schemes of modules over gentle algebras. We describe the smooth points of these schemes, and we also analyze their irreducible components in detail. Several of our results generalize formerly known results, e.g. by dropping acyclicity, and by incorporating band modules. A special class of gentle algebras are Jacobian algebras arising from triangulations of unpunctured marked surfaces. For these we obtain a bijection between the set of generically τ-reduced decorated irreducible components and the set of laminations of the surface. As an application, we get that the set of bangle functions (defined by Musiker–Schiffler–Williams) in the upper cluster algebra associated with the surface coincides with the set of generic Caldero-Chapoton functions (defined by Geiß–Leclerc–Schröer).