Rates of mixing for the Weil-Petersson geodesic flow II: exponential mixing in exceptional moduli spaces

Abstract

We establish exponential mixing for the geodesic flow $\varphi_t\colon T^1S\to T^1S$ of an incomplete, negatively curved surface $S$ with cusp-like singularities of a prescribed order. As a consequence, we obtain that the Weil-Petersson flows for the moduli spaces ${\mathcal M}_{1,1}$ and ${\mathcal M}_{0,4}$ are exponentially mixing, in sharp contrast to the flows for ${\mathcal M}_{g,n}$ with $3g-3+n>1$, which fail to be rapidly mixing. In the proof, we present a new method of analyzing invariant foliations for hyperbolic flows with singularities, based on changing the Riemannian metric on the phase space $T^1S$ and rescaling the flow $\varphi_t$.