The covariance metric in the Blaschke locus

Abstract

We prove that the Blaschke locus has the structure of a finite dimensional smooth manifold away from the Teichm{\"u}ller space and study its Riemannian manifold structure with respect to the covariance metric introduced by Guillarmou, Knieper and Lefeuvre in \cite{GeodesicStretch}. We also identify some families of geodesics in the Blaschke locus arising from Hitchin representations for orbifolds and show that they have infinite length with respect to the covariance metric.