Geodesics with one self-intersection, and other stories (Q715200)

In the first part of the paper under review, the author obtains several results on closed geodesics with a single self-intersection on a hyperbolic surface of finite type, including finding an asymptotic estimate for the number of such geodesics with bounded length \(L,\) which turns out to be \(L\) to the power of the dimension of the Teichmüller space of the surface, and extending various generalizations of McShane's identity for length functions of simple closed geodesics, due to McShane, Bowditch, Mirzakhani and Tan-Wong-Zhang, to identities for length functions of closed geodesics with a single self-intersection. In the second part of the paper, the author shows that for geodesics with a single self-intersection, lifting to a four-fold covering is sufficient to resolve the self-intersection. Along the same direction, the author gives a criterion on when a covering of the boundary of an oriented surface can be extended to a covering of the surface itself, which reads as follows. Let \(k=|\pi_0( \partial S)|\) and let \(\{\Gamma_i\}\) be the conjugacy classes in \(S_n\) determined by the permutation representation associated to a boundary covering \(\pi\;:\widetilde C\rightarrow C=\partial S,\) where \(n\) is the degree of the covering. Then \(\pi\) extends to a covering of the surface \(S\) if and only if the following conditions hold: (1) \(S\) is a planar surface and there exists a collection \(\{\sigma_i\}_{i=1}^k\) of elements of the symmetric group \(S_n\) with \(\sigma_i\in\Gamma_i\) such that \(\sigma_1\sigma_2\dots\sigma_k=e.\) (2) \(S\) is not planar and the sum of the parities of \(\Gamma_1, \dots, \Gamma_k\) vanishes. Several results on quantifying residual finiteness are also obtained for free groups and fundamental groups of closed surfaces. In particular, a linear (resp. cubic and poly-log) bound for the index of a subgroup (resp. a normal subgroup and each fixed level in the lower central series) not containing a given element is obtained.