The Harmonic Map Compactification of Teichmüller Spaces for Punctured Riemann Surfaces

Abstract

In the paper [The Teichmüller theory of harmonic maps, J. Differential Geom. 29 (1989), no. 2, 449–479], Wolf provided a global coordinate system of the Teichmüller space of a closed oriented surface S S with the vector space of holomorphic quadratic differentials on a Riemann surface X X homeomorphic to S S . This coordinate system is via harmonic maps from the Riemann surface X X to hyperbolic surfaces. Moreover, he gave a compactification of the Teichmüller space by adding a point at infinity to each endpoint of harmonic map rays starting from X X in the space. Wolf also showed this compactification coincides with the Thurston compactification. In this paper, we extend the harmonic map ray compactification to the case of punctured Riemann surfaces and show that it still coincides with the Thurston compactification.