Quasicircle

In mathematics, a quasicircle is a Jordan curve in the complex plane that is the image of a circle under a quasiconformal mapping of the plane onto itself. Originally introduced independently by Pfluger (1961) and Tienari (1962), in the older literature (in German) they were referred to as quasiconformal curves, a terminology which also applied to arcs. In complex analysis and geometric function theory, quasicircles play a fundamental role in the description of the universal Teichmüller space, through quasisymmetric homeomorphisms of the circle. Quasicircles also play an important role in complex dynamical systems. In mathematics, a quasicircle is a Jordan curve in the complex plane that is the image of a circle under a quasiconformal mapping of the plane onto itself. Originally introduced independently by Pfluger (1961) and Tienari (1962), in the older literature (in German) they were referred to as quasiconformal curves, a terminology which also applied to arcs. In complex analysis and geometric function theory, quasicircles play a fundamental role in the description of the universal Teichmüller space, through quasisymmetric homeomorphisms of the circle. Quasicircles also play an important role in complex dynamical systems. A quasicircle is defined as the image of a circle under a quasiconformal mapping of the extended complex plane. It is called a K-quasicircle if the quasiconformal mapping has dilatation K. The definition of quasicircle generalizes the characterization of a Jordan curve as the image of a circle under a homeomorphism of the plane. In particular a quasicircle is a Jordan curve. The interior of a quasicircle is called a quasidisk. As shown in Lehto & Virtanen (1973), where the older term 'quasiconformal curve' is used, if a Jordan curve is the image of a circle under a quasiconformal map in a neighbourhood of the curve, then it is also the image of a circle under a quasiconformal mapping of the extended plane and thus a quasicircle. The same is true for 'quasiconformal arcs' which can be defined as quasiconformal images of a circular arc either in an open set or equivalently in the extended plane. Ahlfors (1963) gave a geometric characterization of quasicircles as those Jordan curves for which the absolute value of the cross-ratio of any four points, taken in cyclic order, is bounded below by a positive constant. Ahlfors also proved that quasicircles can be characterized in terms of a reverse triangle inequality for three points: there should be a constant C such that if two points z1 and z2 are chosen on the curve and z3 lies on the shorter of the resulting arcs, then This property is also called bounded turning or the arc condition. For Jordan curves in the extended plane passing through ∞, Ahlfors (1966) gave a simpler necessary and sufficient condition to be a quasicircle. There is a constant C > 0 such that ifz1, z2 are any points on the curve and z3 lies on the segment between them, then These metric characterizations imply that an arc or closed curve is quasiconformal whenever it arises as the image of an interval or the circle under a bi-Lipschitz map f, i.e. satisfying for positive constants Ci.