Ergodicity of the Weil-Petersson geodesic flow (Q1642184)

Given a compact genus-surface \(\Sigma_g\), \(g \geq 2\), we have the Teichmüller space \(T_g\) of marked Riemann surface structures and the moduli space \(M_g\) of Riemann surface structures. The two most well-known metrics on \(T_g\) and \(M_g\) are the Teichmüller metric (broadly speaking, adapted to measuring the difference in conformal structures) and the Weil-Petersson (WP) metric (broadly speaking, adapted to measuring the difference between the uniformized hyperbolic metrics). Each metric has some desirable properties: the Teichmüller metric is complete, but not Riemannian and has positive, flat, and negative curvature features, whereas the WP metric is Riemannian, negatively curved, but incomplete. The ergodic theory of the Teichmüller flow is very well studied, and is known to be ergodic, mixing, and even exponentially mixing (with respect to the natural Masur-Veech invariant measure). In these well-written expository notes, the proof of ergodicity for the WP flow is described. The key idea is to view it as a hyperbolic dynamical system with holes/singularities, and to use a (modified) version of the powerful machinery of Katok-Streclyn which was developed to study these systems. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1395.37001].