On a convexity property of the space of almost fuchsian immersions

Abstract

We study the space of Hopf differentials of almost fuchsian minimal immersions of compact Riemann surfaces. We show that the extrinsic curvature of the immersion at any given point is a concave function of the Hopf differential. As a consequence, we show that the set of all such Hopf differentials is a convex subset of the space of holomorphic quadratic differentials of the surface. In addition, we address the non-equivariant case, and obtain lower and upper bounds for the size of this set.