Local geometry of the $k$-curve graph
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Abstract:
Let $S$ be an orientable surface with negative Euler characteristic. For $k \in \mathbb {N}$, let $\mathcal {C}_{k}(S)$ denote the k-curve graph, whose vertices are isotopy classes of essential simple closed curves on $S$ and whose edges correspond to pairs of curves that can be realized to intersect at most $k$ times. The theme of this paper is that the geometry of Teichmüller space and of the mapping class group captures local combinatorial properties of $\mathcal {C}_{k}(S)$, for large $k$. Using techniques for measuring distance in Teichmüller space, we obtain upper bounds on the following three quantities for large $k$: the clique number of $\mathcal {C}_{k}(S)$ (exponential in $k$, which improves on previous bounds of Juvan, Malnič, and Mobar and Przytycki); the maximum size of the intersection, whenever it is finite, of a pair of links in $\mathcal {C}_{k}$ (quasi-polynomial in $k$); and the diameter in $\mathcal {C}_{0}(S)$ of a large clique of $\mathcal {C}_{k}(S)$ (uniformly bounded). As an application, we obtain quasi-polynomial upper bounds, depending only on the topology of $S$, on the number of short simple closed geodesics on any unit-square tiled surface homeomorphic to $S$.References
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Additional Information
- Tarik Aougab
- Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Brown University, 151 Thayer Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02902
- Received by editor(s): November 16, 2015
- Received by editor(s) in revised form: July 12, 2016, and October 3, 2016
- Published electronically: December 29, 2017
- © Copyright 2017 American Mathematical Society
- Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 370 (2018), 2657-2678
- MSC (2010): Primary 32G15, 57M07, 57M50
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/7098
- MathSciNet review: 3748581