The shear coordinate is a countable coordinate system to describe increasing self-maps of the unit circle, which is furthermore invariant under modular transformations. Characterizations of circle homeomorphism and quasisymmetric homeomorphisms were obtained by D. Šarić. We are interested in characterizing Weil-Petersson circle homeomorphisms using shears. This class of homeomorphisms arises from the Kähler geometry on the universal Teichmüller space.
For this, we introduce diamond shear which is the minimal combination of shears producing WP homeomorphisms. Diamond shears are closely related to the log-Lambda length introduced by R. Penner, which can be viewed as a renormalized length of an infinite geodesic. We obtain sharp results comparing the class of circle homeomorphisms with square summable diamond shears with the Weil-Petersson class and Hölder classes. We also express the Weil-Petersson metric tensor and symplectic form in terms of infinitesimal shears and diamond shears.
This talk is based on joint work with Dragomir Šarić and Catherine Wolfram. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11497.[-]

I will describe a program to describe Hitchin components as the moduli space of some new geometric structure on the surface. This geometric structure generalizes the complex structure. Its construction uses the punctual Hilbert scheme of the plane. It should give a unified description of Hitchin components without fixed complex structure on the surface. I also present a generalization to character varieties for non split real groups in the spirit of G-Higgs bundles.[-]

Going back at least to the works of Witten and Kontsevich, it is known that (symplectic or Weil-Petersson) volumes of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces share many features with the enumeration of maps. It is therefore natural to expect that the theory of random hyperbolic metrics sampled according to the Weil-Petersson measure on, say, punctured spheres is closely related to the theory of random planar maps. I will highlight some similarities and show that tree bijections, which are ubiquitous in the study of random planar maps, have analogues for hyperbolic surfaces. As an application, jointly with Nicolas Curien, we show that these random hyperbolic surfaces with properly rescaled metric admit a scaling limit towards the Brownian sphere when the number of punctures increases.[-]

We consider "higher dimensional Teichmüller discs", by which we mean complex submanifolds of Teichmüller space that contain the Teichmüller disc joining any two of its points. We prove results in the higher dimensional setting that are opposite to the one dimensional behavior: every "higher dimensional Teichmüller disc" covers a "higher dimensional Teichmüller curve" and there are only finitely many "higher dimensional Teichmüller curves" in each moduli space. The proofs use recent results in Teichmüller dynamics, especially joint work with Eskin and Filip on the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle. Joint work with McMullen and Mukamel as well as Eskin, McMullen and Mukamel shows that exotic examples of "higher dimensional Teichmüller discs" do exist.[-]

W. Thurston's theorems almost all aim to give a purely topological problem an appropriate geometry, or to identify an appropriate obstruction.. We will illustrate this in two examples:
--The Thurston pullback map to make a rational map from a post-critically finite branched cover of the sphere, and
--The skinning lemma, to find a hyperbolic structure for a Haken 3-manifold.
In both cases, either the relevant map on Teichmüller space has a fixed point, solving the geometrization problem, or there is an obstruction consisting a multicurve.[-]

I will present a formula giving the Masur-Veech volumes of 'completed' odd strata of quadratic differentials as a sum over stable graphs. This formula generalizes Delecroix-G-Zograf-Zorich formula in the case of principal strata. The coefficients of the formula are in this case intersection numbers of psi classes with the Witten-Kontsevich combinatorial classes. They naturally appear in the count of integer metrics on ribbon graphs with prescribed odd valencies. The study of the possible degenerations of these ribbon graphs allows to express the difference between the volume of the 'completed' stratum and the volume of the stratum as a linear combination of volumes of boundary strata, with explicit rational coefficients. Several conjectures on the large genus asymptotics of volumes or distribution of cylinders follow from this formula. (work in progress with E. Duryev).[-]