Weil-Petersson translation length and manifolds with many fibered fillings (Q2214099)

The article under review studies the structure of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes with respect to their Weil-Petersson translation lengths. This translation length is obtained via the action of mapping classes on Teichmüller space equipped with the Weil-Petersson metric. The paper contains two main results, highlighting both the similarity and the difference to the structure of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes with respect to the Teichmüller translation length, which in turn is obtained via the action of mapping classes on Teichmüller space equipped with the Teichmüller metric. A basic comparison of the Weil-Petersson translation length and the Teichmüller translation length is due to a result of \textit{M. Linch} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 43, 349--352 (1974; Zbl 0284.32015)]: the Weil-Petersson translation length of a pseudo-Anosov map~\(f: \Sigma \to \Sigma\) is bounded from above by the normalised Teichmüller translation length, where the normalisation is by the square root of the hyperbolic area of~\(\Sigma\). For the Teichmüller translation length, the following finiteness properties are known to hold: \begin{itemize} \item[(1)] on every surface~\(\Sigma\) and for every fixed constant~\(L>0\), there are finitely many conjugacy classes of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes with Teichmüller translation length at most~\(L\), \item[(2)] pseudo-Anosov maps of bounded normalised Teichmüller translation length give rise to finitely many mapping tori (after removing a finite number of simple closed curves) by a result of \textit{I. Agol} and \textit{D. Margalit} [Adv. Math. 228, 1466--1502 (2011; Zbl 1234.37022)]. \end{itemize} The main results of the article concern the the Weil-Petersson translation length and provide a negative analogue to (1) and a positive analogue to (2). More precisely, the first main result (Corollary 1.2) states that for large enough~\(L\), the set of all pseudo-Anosov mapping classes with normalised Weil-Petersson translation length at most~\(L\) contains infinitely many conjugacy classes of pseudo-Anosov maps on every closed surface of genus at least two. The proof goes via an extension (Theorem 1.1) of Linch's result to the composition of a pseudo-Anosov mapping class with the power of a Dehn twist along a suitable curve. The second main result (Theorem 1.4) states that the mapping tori of pseudo-Anosov maps of bounded normalised Weil-Petterson translation length give rise to finitely many 3-manifolds after removing a finite number of simple closed curves. The proof uses a careful study of fibered fillings of hyperbolic complements of links in 3-manifolds (Theorem 1.5). Contrary to the situation with respect to the Teichmüller translation length, the construction removes also certain curves that are so-called level, which means they are contained in a single level set of the mapping torus of the original pseudo-Anosov map. Hence, the resulting 3-manifolds do not inherit a mapping torus structure.