The moduli space of Riemann surfaces of large genus (Q2376325)

Let \(\mathcal{M}_g\) be the moduli space of closed surfaces of genus \(g\) and \(\mathcal{M}_{g,\epsilon}\) the \(\epsilon\)-thick part of \(\mathcal{M}_g\). In the paper under review, the authors discuss the minimal number of balls in \(\mathcal{M}_g\) of radius \(r\) to cover \(\mathcal{M}_{g,\epsilon}\) and show that it is bounded below by \((c_1g)^{2g}\) and bounded above by \((c_2g)^{2g}\) for all large \(g\), where \(c_1\) and \(c_2\) are constants depending only on \(\epsilon\) and \(r\). For the proof the authors obtain each of the bounds for particular radii \(r_u\) and \(r_l\), respectively, and combine them with the estimates of the minimal number of balls of radius \(r\) in the Teichmüller space \(\mathcal{T}_g\) to cover a ball \(B_{\mathcal{T}_g}(S,R)\) of radius \(R\) centered at a Riemann surface \(S\) with injectivity radius \(\epsilon\). The estimates in \(\mathcal{T}_g\) are obtained by considering the Bers embedding of the Teichmüller space to the space of holomorphic quadratic differentials. In relation to the sharpness of the Ehrenpreis conjecture it is proved that there are Riemann surfaces of arbitrarily large injectivity radius that are not close to a finite cover of a fixed closed Riemann surface.