Quasi-Fuchsian 3-manifolds and metrics on Teichmüller space (Q623257)

A quasi-Fuchsian \(3\)-manifold \(M\) is said to be almost Fuchsian if it contains an incompressible closed minimal surface \(S\) with principal curvatures in the range of \((-1,1)\). The authors show that a path in the Teichmüller space \(\mathcal{T}_g(\Sigma)\) formed by a foliation of parallel surfaces \(\{S(r)\}\) from \(S\) joins the conformal structures of the two components of the conformal boundaries of \(M\), and they give an upper bound of the Teichmüller distance between \(S\) and \(S(r)\) by the maximal principal curvature on \(S\). As a corollary of this result, the upper bound for the Teichmüller distance between two conformal boundaries is also presented. A point \((\Sigma, \sigma)\in \mathcal{T}_g(\Sigma)\) is considered as the zero quadratic differential under the identification of the cotangent space of \(\mathcal{T}_g(\Sigma)\) at \((\Sigma, \sigma)\) with the space of holomorphic quadratic differentials on \((\Sigma, \sigma)\). The authors give a new potential of the Weil-Petersson metric on \(\mathcal{T}_g(\Sigma)\), which is defined in some neighborhood of the zero quadratic differential by giving the area of a minimal surface derived from each holomorphic quadratic differential.