Comparison Between Teichmuller and Lipschitz Metrics

Abstract

We study the Lipschitz metric on Teichmuller space (defined by Thurston) and compare it with the Teichmuller metric. We show that in the thin part of Teichmuller space the Lipschitz metric is approximated up to bounded additive distortion by the sup metric on a product of lower-dimensional spaces (similar to the Teichmuller metric as shown by Minsky), and in the thick part, the two metrics are comparable within additive error. However, these metrics are not comparable in general; we construct a sequence of pairs of points in Teichmuller space whose distances approach zero in the Lipschitz metric while they approach infinity in the Teichmuller metric.