Teichmüller geometry of moduli space. I: Distance minimizing rays and the Deligne-Mumford compactification (Q616678)

The article under review studies rays in the moduli space \(\mathcal{M}(S)\) of a surface \(S\) of finite analytic type. Following the work of \textit{L. Ji} and \textit{R. MacPherson} [Ann. Inst. Fourier 52, No.2, 457--559 (2002; Zbl 1017.53039)] of rays in locally symmetric spaces, two important classes of rays are considered: eventually distance minimizing (EDM) rays and almost distance minimizing (ADM) rays. There are, however, differences between moduli space and locally symmetric spaces, which the authors elucidate. Since every ray in moduli space comes from the projection of a ray in Teichmüller space (but not conversely, thanks to the existence of elements of the modular group with fixed points), the authors study rays in Teichmüller space. Given a base-point \(\tau =[X,f]\in \text{Teich}(S)\), a choice of direction for a ray starting at \(\tau\) corresponds to a holomorphic quadratic differential \(q\) on \(X\) with unit \(L^1\) norm. The first main theorem of the paper classifies EDM and ADM rays in moduli space in terms of the vertical trajectory structure of the corresponding quadratic differentials (namely, the differentials must be Strebel and mixed Strebel respectively). The main theme of the paper is to create a dictionary between the analytic and combinatorial data from quadratic differentials on one hand, and the metric information captured by rays on the other. Further results in the paper include recovering the Deligne-Mumford compactification of moduli space [\textit{P. Deligne, D. Mumford}, Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 36, 75--109 (1969; Zbl 0181.48803)] by constructing an iterated ray space based on moduli space; a determination of the limiting asymptotic distance between EDM rays in moduli space; and a computation of Tits angles between any two rays. In the latter situation, only three possible values can occur (and conditions are given under when these cases occur), which is in contrast to the behaviour of locally symmetric manifolds which can achieve a continuous spectrum of Tits angles.