Thurston’s weak metric on the Teichmüller space of the torus

Abstract

We define and study a natural weak metric on the Teichmüller space of the torus. A similar metric has been defined by W. Thurston on the Teichmüller space of higher genus surfaces and our definition is motivated by Thurston’s definition. However, we shall see that in the case of the torus, this metric has a different behaviour than on higher genus surfaces.