Symplectic Geometry of Teichmüller Spaces for Surfaces with Ideal Boundary

Abstract

AbstractA hyperbolic 0-metric on a surface with boundary is a hyperbolic metric on its interior, exhibiting the boundary behavior of the standard metric on the Poincaré disk. Consider the infinite-dimensional Teichmüller spaces of hyperbolic 0-metrics on oriented surfaces with boundary, up to diffeomorphisms fixing the boundary and homotopic to the identity. We show that these spaces have natural symplectic structures, depending only on the choice of an invariant metric on $$\mathfrak {sl}(2,\mathbb {R})$$ sl ( 2 , R ) . We prove that these Teichmüller spaces are Hamiltonian Virasoro spaces for the action of the universal cover of the group of diffeomorphisms of the boundary. We give an explicit formula for the Hill potential on the boundary defining the moment map. Furthermore, using Fenchel–Nielsen parameters we prove a Wolpert formula for the symplectic form, leading to global Darboux coordinates on the Teichmüller space.