English

Expected covering radius of a translation surface

Geometric Topology 2020-04-20 v3

Abstract

A translation structure equips a Riemann surface with a singular flat metric. Not much is known about the shape of a random translation surface. We compute an upper bound on the expected value of the covering radius of a translation surface in any stratum H_1(kappa). The covering radius of a translation surface is the largest radius of an immersed disk. In the case of the stratum H_1(2g-2) of translation surfaces of genus g with one singularity, the covering radius is comparable to the diameter. We show that the expected covering radius of a surface is bounded above by a uniform multiple of ((log g)/g)^(1/2), independent of the stratum. This is smaller than what one would expect by analogy from the result of Mirzakhani about the expected diameter of a hyperbolic metric on a Riemann surface. To prove our result, we need an estimate for the volume of the thin part of H_1(kappa) which is given in the appendix.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.10769,
  title  = {Expected covering radius of a translation surface},
  author = {Howard Masur and Kasra Rafi and Anja Randecker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.10769},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

30 pages, 2 figures; v2: generalized from minimal stratum to general strata

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:21:11.943Z