Asymptotics of Weil-Petersson geodesics. I: Ending laminations, recurrence, and flows (Q2269892)

This paper is the first in a series considering the asymptotics of geodesics in the Weil-Petersson metric on the Teichmüller space \(T(S)\) of a compact surface \(S\) with negative Euler characteristic. The ending lamination \(\lambda({\mathbf r})\) for a ray \({\mathbf r}\) arises out of the asymptotics of simple closed curves with an a priori length bound. Despite the lack of a natural visual boundary for the Weil-Petersson metric, these ending laminations provide an effective boundary theory that encodes much of its asymptotic CAT(0) geometry. In particular, the authors prove an ending lamination theorem for the full-measure set of rays that recur to the thick part, and they show that the association of an ending lamination embeds asymptote classes of recurrent rays into the Gromov-boundary of the curve complex \({S}(S)\). As an application, the authors establish fundamentals of the topological dynamics of the Weil-Petersson geodesic flow, showing the density of closed orbits and topological transitivity.