Combinatorially random curves on surfaces

Publication date 22 September 2022

Abstract: We study topological properties of random closed curves on an orientable surface

S

of negative Euler characteristic. Letting

g a m m a_{n}

denote the conjugacy class of the

n^{t h}

step of a simple random walk on the Cayley graph driven by a measure whose support is on a finite generating set, then with probability converging to

1

as

n

goes to infinity, (1) the point in Teichm"uller space at which

g a m m a_{n}

is length-minimized stays in some compact set; (2) the self-intersection number of

g a m m a_{n}

is on the order of

n^{2}

, the minimum length of

g a m m a_{n}

taken over all hyperbolic metrics is on the order of

n

, and the metric minimizing the length of

g a m m a_{n}

is uniformly thick; and (3) when

S

is punctured and the distribution is uniform and supported on a generating set of minimum size, the minimum degree of a cover to which

g a m m a_{n}

admits a simple elevation (which we call the

e x t i t s i m p l e l i f t i n g d e g r e e

of

g a m m a_{n}

) grows at least like

n / l o g (n)

and at most on the order of

n

. We also show that these properties are

e x t i t g e n e r i c

, in the sense that the proportion of elements in the ball of radius

n

in the Cayley graph for which they hold, converges to

1

as

n

goes to infinity. The lower bounds on simple lifting degree for randomly chosen curves we obtain significantly improve the previously best known bounds which were on the order of

l o g^{(1 / 3)} n

. As applications, we give relatively sharp upper and lower bounds on the dilatation of a generic point-pushing pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism in terms of the self-intersection number of its defining curve, as well as upper bounds on the simple lifting degree of a random curve in terms of its intersection number which outperform bounds for general curves.

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