Rates of mixing for the Weil-Petersson geodesic flow. I: No rapid mixing in non-exceptional moduli spaces (Q728231)

The Weil-Petersson metric (defined by an integral over meromorphic quadratic differentials on a Riemann surface) is an incomplete, negatively curved, Riemannian metric on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces of genus \(g\) with \(n\) punctures, and the Weil-Petersson flow is the geodesic flow associated to the Weil-Petersson metric on the unit tangent bundle of the moduli space. The authors proved in [Ann. Math. (2) 175, No. 2, 835--908 (2012; Zbl 1254.37005)] that the Weil-Petersson flow is ergodic and mixing, so intuitively ``almost every flow orbit becomes equidistributed and all regions of the phase space are mixed together after a long time passes''; however, as the authors note, the arguments employed do not provide rates of mixing for the Weil-Petersson flow, i.e., it is not clear how long it takes for such a mixing to occur. It is the main result of the present paper that the rate of mixing of the Weil-Petersson flow is at most polynomial for non-exceptional moduli spaces, i.e., for \(3g-3+n > 1\). Motivated by this, the authors ask whether the Weil-Petersson flow is genuinely polynomially mixing. It is known that the Teichmüller flow is exponentially mixing [\textit{A. Avila} et al., Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 104, 143--211 (2006; Zbl 1263.37051)], and in the forthcoming second part of the present paper [``Rates of mixing for the Weil-Petersson geodesic flow II: exponential mixing in exceptional moduli spaces'', \url{arXiv:1605.09037}], the authors prove that also the Weil-Petersson flow is exponentially mixing in the exceptional case \(3g-3+n = 1\).