Statistical hyperbolicity in Teichmüller space (Q2510439)

The Teichmüller metric is not hyperbolic in any usual sense of the word, although it is well known that it has several properties that are close to those of spaces of negative curvature. Some regions, known as \textit{thin regions}, are examples of regions in which negative curvature fails, namely, these regions are (up to bounded additive error) isometric to product spaces with the sup metric. On the other hand, it is well known that geodesics that stay in the thick regions display many properties of negative curvature. In the paper under review, the authors make this idea more precise by highlighting some of the properties of geodesics which spend a definite proportion of their time in some thick parts of Teichmüller space, showing that these geodesics behave like those of manifolds of negative curvature. For instance, the authors show that the average distance between points in a ball of radius \(r\) is asymptotically \(2r\), which is as large as possible and is a property of manifolds of negative curvature. The measures used here on the Teichmüller space may be the Busemann measure (associated to the Finsler structure), or the Holmes-Thompson measure, or the so-called holonomy measure, or the volume form arising from the symplectic structure. The authors also prove that with respect to these measures, the property, for a geodesic, of having a definite proportion in the thick part, is generic. They also obtain a result quantifying the thinness of random triangles in the Teichmüller space, showing again that ``triangles are mostly thin.''