Totally geodesic submanifolds of Teichmüller space (Q782482)

In the Teichmüller space \(\mathcal{T}_{g,n}\) of a genus-\(g\) surface with \(n\) marked points equipped with the Teichmüller (Kobayashi) metric, totally geodesic submanifolds of complex dimension one are abundant. Namely, between any pair of points there is a complex geodesic, which is a holomorphic and isometric embedding of the hyperbolic plane into \(\mathcal{T}_{g,n}\). These are called Teichmüller disks, and they arise as (projections of) orbits of the \(\text{GL}_2(\mathbb{R})\)-action on the cotangent bundle, which is identified with the space of quadratic differentials \(\mathcal{Q}_{g,n}\). A typical Teichmüller disk further projects to a dense subset of the moduli space \(\mathcal{M}_{g,n}\). This paper shows that in contrast, totally geodesic (complex) submanifolds of \(\textit{higher}\) dimension are more rigid: first, any such submanifold projects to a closed submanifold of \(\mathcal{M}_{g,n}\), and second, \(\mathcal{M}_{g,n}\) has only finitely many such closed submanifolds. (These totally geodesic submanifolds are also subvarieties by the work of [\textit{S. Filip}, Ann. Math. (2) 183, No. 2, 681--713 (2016; Zbl 1342.14015)].) The first examples of such submanifolds that do not arise from a covering construction, were given in [\textit{C. T. McMullen} et al., Ann. Math. (2) 185, No. 3, 957--990 (2017; Zbl 1460.14062)]. The proofs rely on recent results concerning the \(\text{GL}_2(\mathbb{R})\)-action on the Hodge bundle, following the fundamental result that a closed \(\text{GL}_2(\mathbb{R})\)-invariant submanifold is an ``affine invariant submanifold'' -- see [\textit{A. Eskin} et al., Ann. Math. (2) 182, No. 2, 673--721 (2015; Zbl 1357.37040)]. In particular, the finiteness result is a consequence of the finiteness of affine-invariant submanifolds of rank at least two, proved in [\textit{A. Eskin} et al., Ann. Math. (2) 188, No. 1, 281--313 (2018; Zbl 1398.32015)].