This manuscript presents a detailed and original account of the theory of opers defined on pointed stable curves in arbitrary characteristic and their moduli. In particular, it includes the development of the study of dormant opers, which are opers of a certain sort in positive characteristic. The theory of dormant opers (or more generally, opers in positive characteristic) on pointed stable curves, which has proved to be rather rich and deep, was born in the work of S. Mochizuki, who developed the theory for sl(2)-opers and used it to establish p-adic Teichmuller theory. Some parts of Mochizuki's work were later extended in the case of proper smooth curves by K. Joshi, C. Pauly, and other mathematicians. This manuscript represents an advance in the theory of opers that takes the subject beyond the work of Mochizuki, Joshi, and Pauly. In particular, we provide general unified formulations and the basics of principal bundles and connections defined on families of pointed stable curves. The notion of an oper is accordingly introduced in the context of logarithmic algebraic geometry. Some of the results can be regarded as generalizations of results obtained in the fundamental work on the geometric Langlands program developed by A. Beilinson and V. Drinfeld. We also describe various properties and assertions about (dormant) opers, such as duality, comparison with differential operators, and compactification of the moduli space. Our goal is to give an explicit formula, conjectured by Joshi, for the generic number of dormant sl(n)-opers. We do so by obtaining a detailed understanding of the moduli space of dormant opers and computing the Gromov-Witten invariants for Quot schemes in characteristic zero. This formula reveals an interaction between studies in p-adic Teichmfiller theory and certain areas of mathematics, including Gromov-Witten theory.
