Talk page
Title:
Towards Thurston boundaries for higher rank Teichmuller spaces
Speaker:
Abstract:
With the goal of understanding the shapes of diffeomorphisms of surfaces, Thurston in the mid-1970's defined a natural boundary for Teichmuller space in terms of topological objects. An focus topic of the current Simons Center workshop is Hitchin's parametrization of some character varieties that are higher rank analogues of Teichmuller space; these parametrizations have an essential reference to holomorphic forms on a Riemann surface. We describe progress towards finding analogues of Thurston boundaries in some of these higher rank settings, in ways that refer to the descriptions of the representation spaces by holomorphic objects and allied variational problems. We aim for a self-contained talk accessible to non-specialists.
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Workshop: