Spectral gap with polynomial rate for Weil-Petersson random surfaces

Abstract

We show that there is a constant $c>0$ such that a genus $g$ closed hyperbolic surface, sampled at random from the moduli space ${\mathcal{M}}_g$ with respect to the Weil-Petersson probability measure, has Laplacian spectral gap at least $\frac{1}{4}-O\left(\frac{1}{g^c}\right)$ with probability tending to $1$ as $g\to \infty$. This extends and gives a new proof of a recent result of Anantharaman and Monk proved in the series of works [2,3,5,4,6]. Our approach adapts the polynomial method for the strong convergence of random matrices, introduced by Chen, Garza-Vargas, Tropp and van Handel [19], and its generalization to the strong convergence of surface groups by Magee, Puder and van Handel [41], to the Laplacian on Weil-Petersson random hyperbolic surfaces.

v2: typos corrected, improved volume asymptotics