Proper affine actions and geodesic flows of hyperbolic surfaces

Abstract

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for an affine deformation of a Schottky subgroup of O(2,1) to act properly on affine space. There exists a real-valued biaffine map between the cohomology of the Schottky group and the space of geodesic currents on the corresponding hyperbolic surface S. For a fixed cohomology class, this map is uniformly positive or uniformly negative on the space of geodesic currents if and only if the corresponding affine deformation is proper. As a corollary, the deformation space of proper affine deformations is an open convex cone.