Shearing hyperbolic surfaces, bending pleated surfaces and Thurston's symplectic form (Q1355494): Difference between revisions

``The article develops a system of local holomorphic coordinates for the spae of hyperbolic 3-manifolds with the fundamental group of a surface. These coordinates depend on the choice of a geodesic lamination on the surface, and are a complexified version of Thurston's shear coordinates for Teichmüller space. The imaginary part of these coordinates measures the bending of a pleated surface realizing the geodesic lamination. We also show how these coordinates are related, via Thurston's symplectic form on the space of measured geodesic laminations, to the complex length function and its differential.'' By a result of Thurston, any two hyperbolic metrics or points in the Teichmüller space of a closed oriented surface \(S\) can be joined by a (unique) left earthquake obtaining by splitting a hyperbolic surface along a geodesic lamination (a closed collection of geodesics) and then glueing back after a shift to the left; the result is another hyperbolic structure on the surface. The amount of shifting defines a transverse measure for the lamination which is then called a measured lamination. In the first half of the paper a generalization of left earthquakes is considered by allowing shifts to the right as well as to the left; this is called a shear map (or cataclysm). Now the amount of shifting defines something weaker than a transverse measure which is called an \(\mathbb{R}\)-valued transverse cocycle for the lamination. Now, fixed a maximal geodesic lamination \(\lambda\), to each hyperbolic metric on the surface (to each point in its Teichmüller space) a related shearing cocycle can be associated which defines a real-analytic homeomorphism from the Teichmüller space of the surface to an open convex cone in the vector space of all \(\mathbb{R}\)-valued transverse cocycles for the lamination \(\lambda\). Measured laminations occur also as the bending locus of pleated surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds \(M\). Such a surface is totally geodesic in the complement of the lamination, and along the lamination (which consists now of geodesics in \(M)\) it is bended. If the bending is always in the same direction, the amount of bending defines a transverse measure for the lamination. Again this is generalized to the case of general bending resulting in the notion of an \(\mathbb{R}/2 \pi\mathbb{Z}\)-valued transverse cocycle called the bending cocycle of the pleated surface. Now, fixed a maximal geodesic lamination \(\lambda\) on the surface \(S\), each homomorphism \(\rho\) from its fundamental group \(\pi_1(S)\) to the orientation preserving isometry group \(\text{PSL}_2 (\mathbb{C})\) of hyperbolic 3-space defines a unique equivariant pleated surface \(f:\widetilde S\to \mathbb{H}^3\), with bending or pleating locus the preimage of the lamination \(\lambda\) in the universal covering \(\widetilde S\) of \(S\). The space of such pleated surfaces is therefore identified to an open subset \({\mathcal R} (\lambda)\) of the complex algebraic set of homomorphisms \(\rho\) as above. An element \(\rho\in {\mathcal R} (\lambda)\) is characterized both by the bending cocycle of the corresponding pleated surface \(f:\widetilde S\to\mathbb{H}^3\) as well as by the shearing cocycle of the pull back metric of \(f\). It is proved that by combining these two cocycles into a single complex-valued shear-bend cocycle one obtains a biholomorphic homeomorphism from \({\mathcal R} (\lambda)\) to an open subset of the space of all shear-bend cocycles (which is the disjoint union of two copies of \((\mathbb{C}/2 \pi i \mathbb{Z})^{-3 \chi (S)}\) where \(\chi(S)\) denotes the Euler characteristic of \(S)\).