Tessellations of hyperbolic surfaces

A finite subset S of a closed hyperbolic surface F canonically determines a "centered dual decomposition" of F: a cell structure with vertex set S, geodesic edges, and 2-cells that are unions of the corresponding Delaunay polygons. Unlike a Delaunay polygon, a centered dual 2-cell Q is not determined by its collection of edge lengths; but together with its combinatorics, these determine an "admissible space" parametrizing geometric possibilities for the Delaunay cells comprising Q. We illustrate its application by using the centered dual decomposition to extract combinatorial information about the Delaunay tessellation among certain genus-2 surfaces, and with this relate injectivity radius to covering radius here.Comment: 56 pages, 8 figure

The local maxima of maximal injectivity radius among hyperbolic surfaces

The function on the Teichmueller space of complete, orientable, finite-area hyperbolic surfaces of a fixed topological type that assigns to a hyperbolic surface its maximal injectivity radius has no local maxima that are not global maxima.Comment: Dramatically shortened (now 12 pp.), and introductory material simplified, following a referee's suggestion

Explicit rank bounds for cyclic covers

Let $M$ be a closed, orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold and $\phi$ a homomorphism of its fundamental group onto $\mathbb{Z}$ that is not induced by a fibration over the circle. For each natural number $n$ we give an explicit lower bound, linear in $n$, on rank of the fundamental group of the cover of $M$ corresponding to $\phi^{-1}(n\mathbb{Z})$. The key new ingredient is the following result: for such a manifold $M$ and a connected, two-sided incompressible surface of genus $g$ in $M$ that is not a fiber or semi-fiber, a reduced homotopy in $(M,S)$ has length at most $14g-12$.Comment: 21 pages; changes suggested by a referee. Most are minor, but the previous Lemma 3.5 has been removed and all dependence on it has been written ou