The Teichmüller geodesic flow and the geometry of the Hodge bundle
The Teichmüller geodesic flow is the flow obtained by quasiconformal deformation of Riemann surface structures. The goal of this lecture is to show the strong connection between the geometry of the Hodge bundle (a vector bundle over the moduli space of Riemann surfaces) and the dynamics of the Teichmüller geodesic flow. In particular, we shall provide geometric criterions (based on the variational formulas derived by G. Forni) to detect some special orbits (“totally degenerate”) of the Teichmüller...