Teichmüller dynamics, dilation tori and piecewise affine circle homeomorphisms (Q2662957)

The main subject of the paper is the study of generic dynamical properties in families of piecewise affine circle homeomorphisms and closely related transversally affine foliations of tori. ``We study the coarse geometry of the moduli space of dilation tori with two singularities and the dynamical properties of the action of the Teichmüller flow on this moduli space.'' The main result of the paper states that the vertical foliation of a dilation torus is almost always Morse-Smale (every regular leaf accumulates to a closed attracting leaf), with the corollary that the generic piecewise affine circle homeomorphism with two break points is Morse-Smale. Here a dilation surface is a singular structure on a surface modeled on \(\mathbb{C}\) through the group of dilations (i.e., maps of the form \(z \to az + b\), with \(a\) positive real); these are exactly the surfaces one gets by gluing parallel sides of a Euclidean polygon along dilations. ``We believe this article draws a clear analogy between the action of the Teichmüller flow upon the moduli space of dilation surfaces and the action of the geodesic flow on hyperbolic manifolds of infinite volume. In this setting the main theorem becomes a direct analogue of Ahlfors theorem stating that the limit set of a (sufficiently well-behaved) Kleinian group of infinite covolume has measure zero.''