The homology systole of hyperbolic Riemann surfaces

The main goal of this note is to show that the study of closed hyperbolic surfaces with maximum length systole is in fact the study of surfaces with maximum length homological systole. The same result is shown to be true for once-punctured surfaces, and is shown to fail for surfaces with a large number of cusps.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Simple closed geodesics and the study of Teichm\"uller spaces

The goal of the chapter is to present certain aspects of the relationship between the study of simple closed geodesics and Teichm\"uller spaces.Comment: to appear in Handbook of Teichm\"uller theory, vol II

Kissing numbers for surfaces

The so-called {\it kissing number} for hyperbolic surfaces is the maximum number of homotopically distinct systoles a surface of given genus $g$ can have. These numbers, first studied (and named) by Schmutz Schaller by analogy with lattice sphere packings, are known to grow, as a function of genus, at least like g^{\sfrac{4}{3}-\epsilon} for any $\epsilon >0$. The first goal of this article is to give upper bounds on these numbers; in particular the growth is shown to be sub-quadratic. In the second part, a construction of (non hyperbolic) surfaces with roughly g^{\sfrac{3}{2}} systoles is given.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

The genus of curve, pants and flip graphs

This article is about the graph genus of certain well studied graphs in surface theory: the curve, pants and flip graphs. We study both the genus of these graphs and the genus of their quotients by the mapping class group. The full graphs, except for in some low complexity cases, all have infinite genus. The curve graph once quotiented by the mapping class group has the genus of a complete graph so its genus is well known by a theorem of Ringel and Youngs. For the other two graphs we are able to identify the precise growth rate of the graph genus in terms of the genus of the underlying surface. The lower bounds are shown using probabilistic methods.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure

The geometry of flip graphs and mapping class groups

The space of topological decompositions into triangulations of a surface has a natural graph structure where two triangulations share an edge if they are related by a so-called flip. This space is a sort of combinatorial Teichm\"uller space and is quasi-isometric to the underlying mapping class group. We study this space in two main directions. We first show that strata corresponding to triangulations containing a same multiarc are strongly convex within the whole space and use this result to deduce properties about the mapping class group. We then focus on the quotient of this space by the mapping class group to obtain a type of combinatorial moduli space. In particular, we are able to identity how the diameters of the resulting spaces grow in terms of the complexity of the underlying surfaces.Comment: 46 pages, 23 figure

The maximum number of systoles for genus two Riemann surfaces with abelian differentials

In this article, we provide bounds on systoles associated to a holomorphic $1$-form $\omega$ on a Riemann surface $X$. In particular, we show that if $X$ has genus two, then, up to homotopy, there are at most $10$ systolic loops on $(X,\omega)$ and, moreover, that this bound is realized by a unique translation surface up to homothety. For general genus $g$ and a holomorphic 1-form $\omega$ with one zero, we provide the optimal upper bound, $6g-3$, on the number of homotopy classes of systoles. If, in addition, $X$ is hyperelliptic, then we prove that the optimal upper bound is $6g-5$.Comment: 41 page

Systoles and kissing numbers of finite area hyperbolic surfaces

We study the number and the length of systoles on complete finite area orientable hyperbolic surfaces. In particular, we prove upper bounds on the number of systoles that a surface can have (the so-called kissing number for hyperbolic surfaces). Our main result is a bound which only depends on the topology of the surface and which grows subquadratically in the genus.Comment: A minor mistake and a computation fixed, small changes in the exposition. 23 pages, 13 figure

Once punctured disks, non-convex polygons, and pointihedra

We explore several families of flip-graphs, all related to polygons or punctured polygons. In particular, we consider the topological flip-graphs of once-punctured polygons which, in turn, contain all possible geometric flip-graphs of polygons with a marked point as embedded sub-graphs. Our main focus is on the geometric properties of these graphs and how they relate to one another. In particular, we show that the embeddings between them are strongly convex (or, said otherwise, totally geodesic). We also find bounds on the diameters of these graphs, sometimes using the strongly convex embeddings. Finally, we show how these graphs relate to different polytopes, namely type D associahedra and a family of secondary polytopes which we call pointihedra.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure