Pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms on translation surfaces in hyperelliptic components have large entropy

Abstract

We prove that the dilatation of any pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism on a translation surface that belong to a hyperelliptic component is bounded from below uniformly by sqrt{2}. This is in contrast to Penner's asymptotic. Penner proved that the logarithm of the least dilatation of any pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism on a surface of genus g tends to zero at rate 1/g (as g goes to infinity). We also show that our uniform lower bound sqrt{2} is sharp. More precisely the least dilatation of a pseudo-Anosov on a genus g>1 translation surface in a hyperelliptic component belongs to the interval ]sqrt{2},sqrt{2}+2^{1-g}[. The proof uses the Rauzy-Veech induction.