Asymptotics of Weil-Petersson geodesics. II: Bounded geometry and unbounded entropy (Q719070)

This paper is part of a series of papers by the authors on the large-scale behavior of Weil-Petersson geodesics in the Teichmüller space of a compact surface with negative Euler characteristic. The main result is the equivalence of bounded geometry of a Weil-Petersson geodesic, which means precompactness of its projection on moduli space, and bounded combinatorics of its ending lamination, a notion which is analogous to bounded continuous fraction expansions for slopes of torus foliations. More precisely, the authors define a notion of pairs of ending laminations having \(K\)-bounded combinatorics by a uniformness condition for an appropriate notion of distance between the projections of these ending laminations in the curve complex of an essential subsurface, the uniformness being with respect to all essential subsurfaces. They prove the following: Theorem 1. For each \(K>0\) there exists \(\epsilon >0\) such that if the ending laminations of a bi-infinite Weil-Petersson geodesic \(g\) have \(K\)-bounded combinatorics then \(g(t)\) lies in the \(\epsilon\)-thick part of Teichmüller space for each \(t\). The authors also prove the following converse: Theorem 2. For any \(\epsilon >0\) there is a \(K>0\) such that if \(g\) is any bi-infinite geodesic in the \(\epsilon\)-thick part of Teichmüller space, then the combinatorics of the ending laminations associated to its ends are \(K\)-bounded. The theorems were also obtained by [\textit{U. Hamenstädt}, ``Invariant measures for the Weil-Petersson flow'', Preprint (2008)]. Another result of the paper under review is the following: Theorem 3. For all \(\epsilon >0\) there exists \(D>0\) such that each bi-infinite \(\epsilon\)-thick Weil-Petersson geodesic \(g\) lies at Hausdorff distance \(D\) in the Teichmüller metric from a unique Teichmüller geodesic. Finally, the authors apply these results to show that there are compact Weil-Petersson geodesic flow-invariant subsets of arbitrarily large topological entropy. (For part I see the authors' paper [``Asymptotics of Weil-Petersson geodesics. I: Ending laminations, recurrence, and flows, '' Geom. Funct. Anal. 19, No.\,5, 1229--1257 (2010; Zbl 1216.32007)].)