We prove that the universal Teichmuller space T(1) carries a new structure of a complex Hilbert manifold. We show that the connected component of the identity of T(1), the Hilbert submanifold T_{0}(1), is a topological group. We define a Weil-Petersson metric on T(1) by Hilbert space inner products on tangent spaces, compute its Riemann curvature tensor, and show that T(1) is a Kahler-Einstein manifold with negative Ricci and sectional curvatures. We introduce and compute Mumford-Miller-Morita characteristic forms for the vertical tangent bundle of the universal Teichmuller curve fibration over the universal Teichmuller space. As an application, we derive Wolpert curvature formulas for the finite-dimensional Teichmuller spaces from the formulas for the universal Teichmuller space.
The sectional curvature of the Weil-Petersson metric on Teichmuller space is known to be negative. We show that this Weil-Petersson sectional curvature is not pinched from above by any negative constants, i.e., there is no negative upper bound.
In this paper, we study the asymptotic geometry of Teichmuller space of Riemann surfaces and give bounds on the Weil-Petersson sectional curvature of Teichmuller space, in terms of the length of the shortest geodesic on the surface. This will also imply that the sectional curvature is not pinched from above or below by any negative constant.
The universal Teichmüller space is an infinitely dimensional generalization of the classical Teichmüller space of Riemann surfaces. It carries a natural Hilbert structure, on which one can define a natural Riemannian metric, the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper we investigate the Weil-Petersson Riemannian curvature operator $\tilde{Q}$ of the universal Teichmüller space with the Hilbert structure, and prove the following: (i) $\tilde{Q}$ is non-positive definite. (ii) $\tilde{Q}$ is a bounded operator. (iii) $\tilde{Q}$ is not compact; the set of the spectra of $\tilde{Q}$ is not discrete.…
We extend a definition of the Weil-Petersson potential on the universal Teichmuller space to the quasi-Fuchsian deformation space. We prove that up to a constant, this function coincides with the Weil-Petersson potential on the quasi-Fuchsian deformation space. As a result, we prove a lower bound for the Weil-Petersson potential on the quasi-Fuchsian deformation space.
Over the past two decades the theory of the Weil-Petersson metric has been extended to general Teichmüller spaces of infinite type, including for example the universal Teichmüller space. In this paper we give a survey of the main results in the Weil-Petersson geometry of infinite-dimensional Teichmüller spaces. This includes the rigorous definition of complex Hilbert manifold structures, Kähler geometry and global analysis, and generalizations of the period mapping. We also discuss the motivations of the theory in representation theory and physics beginning in the 1980s. Some examples of the a…
On the thick part of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, where there is a positive lower bound of the systole of the surface, we show that all Weil-Petersson Riemannian curvatures are bounded, independent of the genus of the surface.
The primary purpose of the paper is to study how a Riemann mapping depends on the corresponding Jordan curve. We are mainly concerned with those Jordan curves in the Weil-Petersson class, namely, the corresponding Riemann mappings can be quasiconformally extended to the whole plane with Beltrami coefficients being square integrable under the Poincaré metric. We endow the space of all normalized Weil-Petersson curves with a new real Hilbert manifold structure and show that it is topologically equivalent to the standard complex Hilbert manifold structure.
In a family of compact, canonically polarized, complex manifolds the first variation of the lengths of closed geodesics is computed. As an application, we show the coincidence of the Fenchel-Nielsen and Weil-Petersson symplectic forms on the Teichmueller spaces of compact Riemann surfaces in a purely geometric way. The method can also be applied to situations like moduli spaces of weighted punctured Riemann surfaces, where the methods of Kleinian groups are not available.
In this paper we study the systole function along Weil-Petersson geodesics. We show that the square root of the systole function is uniformly Lipschitz on Teichmüller space endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric. As an application, we study the growth of the Weil-Petersson inradius of moduli space of Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ with $n$ punctures as a function of $g$ and $n$. We show that the Weil-Petersson inradius is comparable to $\sqrt{\ln{g}}$ with respect to $g$, and is comparable to $1$ with respect to $n$. Moreover, we also study the asymptotic behavior, as $g$ goes to infinity, of t…
We present a brief but nearly self-contained proof of a formula for the Weil-Petersson Hessian of the geodesic length of a closed curve (either simple or not simple) on a hyperbolic surface. The formula is the sum of the integrals of two naturally defined positive functions over the geodesic, proving convexity of this functional over Teichmuller space (due to Wolpert (1987)). We then estimate this Hessian from below in terms of local quantities and distance along the geodesic. The formula extends to proper arcs on punctured hyperbolic surfaces, and the estimate to laminations. Wolpert's result…
We consider the correspondence between the space of $p$-Weil-Petersson curves $γ$ on the plane and the $p$-Besov space of $u=\log γ'$ on the real line for $p >1$. We prove that the variant of the Beurling-Ahlfors extension defined by using the heat kernel yields a holomorphic map for $u$ on a domain of the $p$-Besov space to the space of $p$-integrable Beltrami coefficients. This in particular gives a global real-analytic section for the Teichmüller projection from the space of $p$-integrable Beltrami coefficients to the $p$-Weil-Petersson Teichmüller space.
Let $S_g$ be a closed surface of genus $g$ and $\mathbb{M}_g$ be the moduli space of $S_g$ endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper we investigate the Weil-Petersson curvatures of $\mathbb{M}_g$ for large genus $g$. First, we study the asymptotic behavior of the extremal Weil-Petersson holomorphic sectional curvatures at certain thick surfaces in $\mathbb{M}_g$ as $g \to \infty$. Then we prove two curvature properties on the whole space $\mathbb{M}_g$ as $g\to \infty$ in a probabilistic way.
Let $Σ$ be a Riemann surface of genus $g$ bordered by $n$ curves homeomorphic to the circle $\mathbb{S}^1$, and assume that $2g+2-n>0$. For such bordered Riemann surfaces, the authors have previously defined a Teichmüller space which is a Hilbert manifold and which is holomorphically included in the standard Teichmüller space. Based on this, we present alternate models of the aforementioned Teichmüller space and show in particular that it is locally modelled on a Hilbert space of $L^2$ Beltrami differentials, which are holomorphic up to a power of the hyperbolic metric, and has a convergent We…
We shall show that $q$-semipositivity of the vector bundle $E$ over a Kähler total space $\mathcal X$ implies the Griffiths-semipositivity of the $q$-th direct image of $\mathcal O(K_{\mathcal X/B}\otimes E)$. As an application, we shall give a negative-curvature criterion for the generalized Weil-Petersson metric on the base manifold.
On a convex body in a Euclidean space, we introduce a new variational formulation for its Funk metric, a Finsler metric compatible with the tautological Finsler structure of the convex body. We generalize the metric on Teichmuller spaces with the Weil-Petersson distance function. A set of similarities the resulting metric structure shares with Thurston's asymmetric metric is noted.
The Teichmüller curve is the fiber space over Teichmüller space of closed Riemann surfaces, where the fiber over a point in Teichmüller space is the underlying surface. We derive formulas for sectional curvatures on the Teichmüller curve. In particular, our method can be applied to investigate the geometry of the Weil-Petersson geodesic as a three-manifold, and the degeneration of the curvatures near the infinity of the augmented Teichmüller space along a Weil-Petersson geodesic, as well as the minimality of hyperbolic surfaces in this three-manifold.
We find bounds for Weil-Petersson holomorphic sectional curvature, and the Weil-Petersson curvature operator in several regimes, that do not depend on the topology of the underlying surface. Among other results, we show that the minimal (most negative) eigenvalue of the curvature operator at any point in the Teichmüller space $\Teich(S_g)$ of a closed surface $S_g$ of genus $g$ is uniformly bounded away from zero. Restricting to a thick part of $\Teich(S_g)$, we show that the minimal eigenvalue is uniformly bounded below by an explicit constant which does not depend on the topology of the surf…
We rigorously define the Liouville action functional for finitely generated, purely loxodromic quasi-Fuchsian group using homology and cohomology double complexes naturally associated with the group action. We prove that the classical action - the critical point of the Liouville action functional, considered as a function on the quasi-Fuchsian deformation space, is an antiderivative of a 1-form given by the difference of Fuchsian and quasi-Fuchsian projective connections. This result can be considered as global quasi-Fuchsian reciprocity which implies McMullen's quasi-Fuchsian reciprocity. We …
We prove that any mapping torus of a pseudo-Anosov mapping class with bounded normalized Weil-Petersson translation length contains a finite set of transverse and level closed curves, and drilling out this set of curves results in one of a finite number of cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The number of manifolds in the finite list depends only on the bound for normalized translation length. We also prove a complementary result that explains the necessity of removing level curves by producing new estimates for the Weil-Petersson translation length of compositions of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes …
This is a survey paper on the topic of Weil-Petersson geometry of Teichmuller spaces. Even though historically the subject has been developed as a branch of complex analysis, the treatment here is from the view-point of differential geometry, much influenced by the works of Eells, Earle, Fischer, Tromba and Wolpert over the several decades. The Weil-Petersson geometry has negative sectional curvature, and the main theme of this article is to exploit the convexity of the Weil-Petersson distance function induced by the negativity of the curvature, from Riemannian geometric approaches as well as …
The paper presents some recent results on the Weil-Petersson geometry theory of the universal Teichmüller space, a topic which is important in Teichmüller theory and has wide applications to various areas such as mathematical physics, differential equation and computer vision. \noindent (1) It is shown that a sense-preserving homeomorphism $h$ on the unit circle belongs to the Weil-Petersson class, namely, $h$ can be extended to a quasiconformal mapping to the unit disk whose Beltrami coefficient is squarely integrable in the Poincaré metric if and only if $h$ is absolutely continuous such tha…
Similarly to the Bers simultaneous uniformization, the product of the $p$-Weil-Petersson Teichmüller spaces for $p \geq 1$ provides the coordinates for the space of $p$-Weil-Petersson embeddings $γ$ of the real line $\mathbb R$ into the complex plane $\mathbb C$. We prove the biholomorphic correspondence from this space to the $p$-Besov space of $u=\log γ'$ on $\mathbb R$ for $p>1$. From this fundamental result, several consequences follow immediately which clarify the analytic structures concerning parameter spaces of $p$-Weil-Petersson curves. In particular, it follows that the correspondenc…
In [4], Z. Huang showed that in the thick part of the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_g$ of compact Riemann surfaces of genus $g$, the sectional curvature of the Weil--Petersson metric is bounded below by a constant depending on injectivity radius, but independent of the genus $g$. In this article, we prove this result by a different method. We also show that the same result holds for Ricci curvature. For the universal Teichmüller space equipped with Hilbert structure induced by Weil--Petersson metric, we prove that its sectional curvature is bounded below by a universal constant.
We investigate stable holomorphic vector bundles on a compact complex Kähler manifold and more generally on an orbifold that is equipped with a Kähler structure. We use the existence of Hermite-Einstein connections in this set-up and construct a generalized Weil-Petersson form on the moduli space of stable vector bundles with fixed determinant bundle. We show that the Weil-Petersson form extends as a (semi-)positive closed current for degenerating families that are restrictions of coherent sheaves. Such an extension will be called a Weil-Petersson current. When the orbifold is of Hodge type, t…
We study the Hilbert manifold structure on $T_{0}(1)$ -- the connected component of the identity of the Hilbert manifold T(1). We characterize points on $T_{0}(1)$ in terms of Bers and pre-Bers embeddings, and prove that the Grunsky operators $B_{1}$ and $B_{4}$, associated with the points in $T_{0}(1)$ via conformal welding, are Hilbert-Schmidt. We define a ``universal Liouville action'' -- a real-valued function $\SSS_{1}$ on $T_{0}(1)$, and prove that it is a Kähler potential of the Weil-Petersson metric on $T_{0}(1)$. We also prove that $\SSS_{1}$ is $-\tfrac{1}{12π}$ times the logarithm o…
We give an overview of the proof for Mirzakhani's volume recursion for the Weil-Petersson volumes of the moduli spaces of genus $g$ hyperbolic surfaces with $n$ labeled geodesic boundary components, and her application of this recursion to Witten's conjecture and the study of simple geodesic length spectrum growth rates.
Given a continuous vector field $λ(t, \cdot)$ of Sobolev class $H^{\frac 32}$ on the unit circle $S^1$, the flow maps $η=g(t, \cdot)$ of the differential equation $$ \cases \frac{dη}{dt}=λ(t, η)\\ η(0,ζ)=ζ\endcases $$ are known to be quasisymmetric homeomorphisms. Very recently, Gay-Balmaz-Ratiu [GR] conjectured that the flow curve $g(t, \cdot)$ is in the Weil-Petersson class WP$(S^1)$ and is continuously differentiable with respect to the Hilbert manifold structure of WP$(S^1)$ introduced by Takhtajan-Teo [TT]. The first assertion had already been demonstrated in our previous paper [Sh2]. In …
In this work, we study an analogue of the Weil-Petersson metric on the space of Blaschke products of degree 2 proposed by McMullen. Via the Bers embedding, one may view the Weil-Petersson metric as a metric on the main cardioid of the Mandelbrot set. We prove that the metric completion attaches the geometrically finite parameters from the Euclidean boundary of the main cardioid and conjecture that this is the entire completion. For the upper bound, we estimate the intersection of a circle $S_r = \{z : |z| = r\}$, $r \approx 1$, with an invariant subset $\mathcal G \subset \mathbb{D}$ called a …
Using the identification of the symmetric space $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SO}(n)$ with the Teichmüller space of flat $n$-tori of unit volume, we explore several metrics and compactifications of these spaces, drawing inspiration both from Teichmüller theory and symmetric spaces. We define and study analogs of the Thurston, Teichmüller, and Weil-Petersson metrics. We show the Teichmüller metric is a symmetrization of the Thurston metric, which is a polyhedral Finsler metric, and the Weil-Petersson metric is the Riemannian metric of $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SO}(n)$ as a symmetr…
We extend Velling's approach and prove that the second variation of the spherical areas of a family of domains defines a Hermitian metric on the universal Teichmuller curve, whose pull back to Diff+(S^1)/S^1 coincides with the Kirillov metric. We show that the vertical integration of the square of the symplectic form of Velling-Kirillov metric on the universal Teichmuller curve is the symplectic form that defines the Weil-Petersson metric on the universal Teichmuller space. Restricted to a finite dimensional Teichmuller space, the vertical integration of the corresponding form on the Teichmull…
The restricted class of quasicircles sometimes called the "Weil-Petersson-class" has been a subject of interest in the last decade. In this paper we establish a Sokhotski-Plemelj jump formula for WP-class quasicircles, for boundary data in a certain conformally invariant Besov space. We show that this Besov space is precisely the set of traces on the boundary of harmonic functions of finite Dirichlet energy on the WP-class quasidisk. We apply this result to multiply connected domains, Sigma, which are the complement of n+1 WP-class quasidisks. Namely, we give a bounded isomorphism between the …
