English

Ordering curves on surfaces

Geometric Topology 2025-06-10 v1

Abstract

We study the order of lengths of closed geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces. Our first main result is that the order of lengths of curves determine a point in Teichm\"uller space. In an opposite direction, we identify classes of curves whose order never changes, independently of the choice of hyperbolic metric. We use this result to identify short curves with small intersections on pairs of pants.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.06481,
  title  = {Ordering curves on surfaces},
  author = {Hugo Parlier and Hanh Vo and Binbin Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06481},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

27 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:04:22.115Z