The Thurston metric on hyperbolic domains and boundaries of convex hulls

Abstract

We show that the nearest point retraction is a uniform quasi-isometry from the Thurston metric on a hyperbolic domain in the Riemann sphere to the boundary of the convex hull of its complement. As a corollary, one obtains explicit bounds on the quasi-isometry constant of the nearest point retraction with respect to the Poincare metric when the domain is uniformly perfect. We also establish Marden and Markovic's conjecture that a hyperbolic domain is uniformly perfect if and only if the nearest point retraction is Lipschitz with respect to the Poincare metric.