Minimal intersection of curves on surfaces

DOI10.1007/S10711-009-9385-YMaRDI QIDQ849369zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Moira Chas

Publication date 25 February 2010

Published in Geometriae Dedicata (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.2439

zbMATH Keywords

amalgamated free productconjugacy classesfundamental groupHNN extensionintersection numbersimple closed curvesurface

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Free products of groups, free products with amalgamation, Higman-Neumann-Neumann extensions, and generalizations (20E06) General low-dimensional topology (57M99)

Abstract: In the eighties Goldman discovered a Lie algebra structure on the vector space generated by the free homotopy classes of oriented curves on an oriented surface. The Lie bracket [a,b] is defined as the signed sum over the intersection points of a and b of the loop product of at the intersection points. If one of the classes has a simple representative we give a combinatorial group theory description of the terms of the Lie bracket and prove that this bracket has as many terms, counted with multiplicity, as the minimal number of intersection points of a and b. In other words the bracket with a simple element has no cancellation and determines minimal intersection numbers. We show that analogous results hold for the Lie bracket (also discovered by Goldman) of unoriented curves. We give three applications: a factorization of Thurston's map defining the boundary of Teichmuller space, various decompositions of the underlying vector space of conjugacy classes into ad invariant subspaces and a connection between bijections of the set of conjugacy classes of curves on a surface preserving the Goldman bracket and the mapping class group.

Review text

\textit{W. M. Goldman} [Invent. Math. 85, 263--302 (1986; Zbl 0619.58021)] discovered a Lie algebra structure on the vector space generated by the free homotopy classes of oriented curves on an oriented surface, by defining the Lie product of two oriented curves as the signed sum, summed over the intersection points of the two curves, of their loop products at each of these intersection points. The main result of the present, well-written paper states that, if one of the two classes can be represented by a simple closed curve, the minimal number of intersection points of two free homotopy classes of oriented curves is equal to the number of terms of their Lie bracket, counted with multiplicities (and an analogous result also for the case of unoriented curves). Goldman had proved that if the Lie bracket of the two classes is zero then the two classes have disjoint representatives, by using Kerckhoff's earthquake convexity property of Teichmüller space. The proof of the present generalization is purely combinatorial-topological instead, exploiting the combinatorics of the decomposition of the fundamental group as a free product with amalgamation or HNN-extension induced by a simple closed curve on a surface; as a result, a combinatorial group theory description of the terms of the Lie bracket is also obtained.

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Cited in

(18)

• Combinatorial Lie bialgebras of curves on surfaces.
• On minimal distance between two surfaces
• Equal angles of intersecting geodesics for every hyperbolic metric
• Self-intersection points in classical area-minimizing surfaces
• Geometric intersections of loops on surfaces
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