Triangulated Riemann surfaces with boundary and the Weil-Petersson Poisson structure

Abstract

Given a Riemann surface with boundary S, the lengths of a maximal system of disjoint simple geodesic arcs on S that start and end at the boundary of S perpendicularly are coordinates on the Teichmueller space T(S). We compute the Weil-Petersson Poisson structure on T(S) in this system of coordinates and we prove that it limits pointwise to the piecewise-linear Poisson structure defined by Kontsevich on the arc complex of S. As a byproduct of the proof, we obtain a formula for the first-order variation of the distance between two closed geodesics under Fenchel-Nielsen deformation.