The minima of the geodesic length functions of uniform filling curves

Abstract

There is a natural link between (multi-)curves that fill up a closed oriented surface and dessins d'enfants. We use this approach to exhibit explicitly the minima of the geodesic length function of a kind of curves (uniform filling curves) which include those that admit a homotopy equivalent representative such that all self-intersection points as well as all faces of their complement have the same multiplicity. We show that these minima are attained at the Grothendieck-Belyi surfaces determined by a natural dessin d'enfant associated to these filling curves. In particular they are all Riemann surfaces defined over number fields.