Simultaneous flips on triangulated surfaces (Q1616279)

A flip of a triangulated surface replaces one diagonal of a quadrilateral of the triangulation by the other one; the distance between two triangulations of a surface considers the minimal number of simultaneous flip moves (i.e., flip moves performed on finitely many disjoint quadrilaterals) which allow to pass from one triangulation to the other. As the authors note, the simultaneous flip metric on the modular simultaneous flip graph of a surface (whose vertices are triangulations up to homeomorphism, two vertices are connected by an edge if they differ by a simultaneous flip) can be thought of as a combinatorial analogue of metrics such as the Teichmüller and Thurston metrics on Teichmüller and modular spaces of surfaces. ``Our main goal is to study the diameters of modular flip graphs of finite-type orientable surfaces endowed with this distance.'' The main result of the paper is the following. There is a constant \(U>0\) such that any two triangulations up to homeomorphisms of an orientable surface of genus \(g\) with \(n\) labeled marked points are related by at most \(U(\text{log}(g+n))^2\) simultaneous flip moves. The flip graphs have been studied previously when the underlying surface is a polygon \(P_n\) with \(n\) vertices, by \textit{P. Bose} et al. [J. Graph Theory 54, No. 4, 307--330 (2007; Zbl 1120.05024)] who show that any two triangulations of \(P_n\) are related by at most \(K \, \text{log}(n)\) simultaneous flips, for some constant \(K>0\).