Bottlenecks for Weil-Petersson geodesics (Q2656140)

This article develops methods to understand the trajectory structure of a non-recurrent Weil-Petersson (WP) geodesic ray in Teichmüller space and its WP-completion, in terms of its ``itinerary'', namely the sequence of boundary strata that it approaches, or equivalently, the sequence of ``short curves'' along the ray. The main result is a ``visibility property'' that can be (roughly) described as follows: if two WP geodesic rays are strongly asymptotic to two boundary strata corresponding to a pair of filling and ``co-large'' multicurves, then there is a bi-infinite WP geodesic that is strongly asymptotic in the forward direction to one ray and in the backward direction to the other. The authors conjecture that the assumption of ``co-large'' can be dropped. In the ``opposite'' case when the pair of WP geodesic rays are \textit{recurrent}, such a visibility property was proved in [\textit{J. Brock} et al., Geom. Funct. Anal. 19, No. 5, 1229--1257 (2010; Zbl 1216.32007)]. The proof is technical, and builds upon some of the work of the second author in [J. Topol. Anal. 7, No. 4, Article ID 543 (2015; Zbl 1326.30043)]. This paper is an important contribution to a line of investigation that started with the work of Brock et al. [loc. cit], and its sequel [\textit{J. Brock} et al., Geom. Funct. Anal. 21, No. 4, 820--850 (2011; Zbl 1227.32018)], that introduced the notion of an ``ending lamination'' associated with a WP geodesic ray, and initiated a study of its itinerary via its ``subsurface projection coefficients''. Subsurface coefficients originally arose in the context of the solution of the Ending Lamination Conjecture due to [the first author, Ann. Math. (2) 171, No. 1, 1--107 (2010; Zbl 1193.30063); \textit{J. F. Brock} et al., Ann. Math. (2) 176, No. 1, 1--149 (2012; Zbl 1253.57009)], that relied on understanding the sequence of short curves exiting an end of a hyperbolic 3-manifold. They were also applied to understanding the trajectory structure of Teichmüller geodesics in [\textit{K. Rafi}, Geom. Topol. 9, 179--202 (2005; Zbl 1082.30037)]. The article concludes with some comparison with those results.