The Weil-Petersson curvature operator on the universal Teichmüller space (Q1741812)

The authors study properties of the Weil-Petersson Riemannian curvature operator \(\tilde{Q}\) on the universal Teichmüller space with a Hilbert structure. The universal Teichmüller space endowed with a Hilbert structure, denoted by \(T_H(1)\), admits the Weil-Petersson metric. The space \(T_H(1)\) is an infinite-dimensional complex manifold, but it has an orthonormal basis with respect to the Weil-Petersson metric on \(H^{-1,1}(\mathbb{D})\), a sub-Hilbert space of \(\Omega^{-1,1}(\mathbb{D})\). The authors prove that the curvature operator \(\tilde{Q}\) is non-positive definite and characterize \(C\in \wedge^2TT_H(1)\) with \(\tilde{Q}(C,C)=0\) by the action on \(\wedge^2TT_H(1)\) defined by the complex structure associated with the Weil-Petersson metric. It is also proved that \(\tilde{Q}\) is bounded. A remarkable result is that \(\tilde{Q}\) is not compact. This is proved by contradiction using the spectral theorem for compact operators and the Cauchy interlacing theorem. The last theorem in the paper is about harmonic maps from certain symmetric spaces into \(T_H(1)\). It implies that the quaternionic hyperbolic space and the Cayley plane cannot be totally geodesically immersed in \(T_H(1)\).