Pleating invariants for punctured torus groups. (Q1426433)

In the late 1960's Bers posed a question of finding the shape of quasi-Fuchsian space explicitly. In this paper the authors give a complete description of the space of quasi-Fuchsian punctured torus groups by using pleating invariants. Pleating invariants for a non-Fuchsian quasi-Fuchsian group is the projective class of a pair of a measured lamination \(\mu^{\pm}\) and its lamination length \(l_{\mu^{\pm}}\), where \(\mu^{\pm}\) is chosen from the projective class of the bending measures \([pl^{\pm}]\). A non-Fuchsian quasi-Fuchsian marked punctured torus group is determined by the pleating invariants uniquely up to conjugacy in \(\mathrm{PSL}(2,\mathbb C)\). It is proved that the rational pleating planes are dense in the space of quasi-Fuchsian punctured torus groups. For measured laminations \(\mu,\nu\) on the punctured torus with the intersection \(i(\mu,\nu)>0\) and \(c>0\), it is proved that the pleating ray satisfying \([pl^{+}]=[\mu]\), \([pl^{-}]=[\nu]\) and \(l_{\nu}=c\) is a non-empty connected non-singular component of the \(\mathbb R^{+}\)-locus of the restriction of the complex length \(\lambda_{\nu}\) to the quakebend plane \(\mathcal Q_{\mu,c}\). The restriction is a diffeomorphism onto its image. Also the authors give examples to compute the pleating plane.