Quasi-Fuchsian 3-Manifolds and Metrics on Teichmüller Space

Ren Guo, Zheng Huang, Biao Wang

Published 2009-09-13, updated 2010-03-19Version 2

An almost Fuchsian 3-manifold is a quasi-Fuchsian manifold which contains an incompressible closed minimal surface with principal curvatures in the range of $(-1,1)$. Such a 3-manifold $M$ admits a foliation of parallel surfaces, whose locus in Teichm\"{u}ller space is represented as a path $\gamma$, we show that $\gamma$ joins the conformal structures of the two components of the conformal boundary of $M$. Moreover, we obtain an upper bound for the Teichm\"{u}ller distance between any two points on $\gamma$, in particular, the Teichm\"{u}ller distance between the two components of the conformal boundary of $M$, in terms of the principal curvatures of the minimal surface in $M$. We also establish a new potential for the Weil-Petersson metric on Teichm\"{u}ller space.