Expansions for Hilbert schemes of points on semistable degenerations

Abstract The aim of this paper is to extend the expanded degeneration construction of Li and Wu to obtain good degenerations of Hilbert schemes of points on semistable families of surfaces, as well as to discuss alternative stability conditions and parallels to the GIT construction of Gulbrandsen, Halle and Hulek and logarithmic Hilbert scheme constructions of Maulik and Ranganathan. We construct a good degeneration of Hilbert schemes of points as a proper Deligne-Mumford stack and show that it provides a geometrically meaningful example of a construction arising from the work of Maulik and Ranganathan.