Geometric aspects of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces (Q2460718)

The paper under review is a survey on various metrics on Teichmüller space and on the moduli space. The authors study in particular the Kähler-Einstein metric on Teichmüller space (which descends to a metric on moduli space) whose existence and uniqueness has been established in the early 1980s by Chang and Yau. They also study the McMullen metric, which is complete and Kähler hyperbolic, and which is obtained as a perturbation of the Weil-Petersson metric. The authors also introduce new complete Kähler metrics, namely, the Ricci metric and the perturbed Ricci metric. The main results they obtain concern the curvature properties and the asymptotic behaviour of these metrics. The perturbed Ricci metric has very good curvature properties; in particular, it has bounded negative Ricci and holomorphic sectional curvatures, and it has bounded geometry. The authors also show that all the complete metrics considered are equivalent on the moduli space and have Poincaré type growth near the compactification divisor. The equivalence of the Kähler-Einstein metric with the Teichmüller metric and with the Bergman metric have been conjectured in the 1980s by Yau. The authors also obtain that the Kähler-Einstein metric has strongly bounded geometry and that the logarithmic cotangent bundle of the moduli space is stable in the sense of Mumford. The paper under review presents the results without proofs, and the proofs have been appeared in two papers by the same authors published in J. Differ. Geom. 68, No. 3, 571--637 (2004; Zbl 1078.30038) and ibid. 69, No. 1, 163--216 (2005; Zbl 1086.32011).