Behavior of geodesic-length functions on Teichmüller space (Q930643)

In the last 25 years, the author of the paper under review published a series of papers that made a major breakthrough in our understanding of the geometry of the Weil-Petersson geometry of Teichmüller space. In the present paper, he presents new results on the subject, that concern the intrinsic local differential geometry of the Weil-Petersson metric. The results are based on a study of the gradient and Hessian of the geodesic-length functions of closed curves. The results contained in this paper are numerous, and in this review we can only mention a few of them. They include the following: Expansions and general bounds for the Weil-Petersson pairing of gradients of geodesic-length functions, expansions for the covariant derivatives of gradients and a calculation of their Lie brackets, a uniform comparison of the real and complex Hessians with applications to the study of lengths of compactly supported measured geodesic laminations and to the study of the almost-complex structure of Teichmüller space, comparisons for the Weil-Petersson metric pairing for Bers regions where the lengths of a maximal family of disjoint closed geodesics are bounded from above, expansions for the metric pairing at the maximal frontier points of the augmented Teichmüller space, and a study of the behaviour of Weil-Petersson geodesics terminating at the augmentation. A product of metrics of the form \(4dr^2+r^6d\vartheta^2\) on \(\mathbb{R}^2\) is compared to the Weil-Petersson metric. This comparison accounts for the expansion of the Weil-Petersson connection, for recent properties of the Weil-Petersson sectional curvature, and for the description of the Alexandrov tangent cones at points of the augmented Teichmüller space. The model metric also provides expansions for the Weil-Petersson metric in Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates and new comparison results for the curvature. The expansion and the comparison results improve previously known results. The tools used in the proofs involve an alternative definition of the frontier points of the augmented Teichmüller space in terms of representation groups and the Chabauty topology, and bounding sums of the inverse square exponential-distances for the orbit of a discrete isometry group action. The author also discusses applications to the study of the compactified moduli space of stable curves, to the study of fixed points of holomorphic group actions, and to the harmonic map approach to Teichmüller space.