Horoboundary and rigidity of filling geodesic currents

Abstract

We endow the space of projective filling geodesic currents on a closed hyperbolic surface with a natural asymmetric metric extending Thurston's asymmetric metric on Teichm\"uller space, as well as analogous metrics arising from Hitchin representations. More generally, we show that this metric extends beyond surface groups and geodesic currents, and encompasses metrics associated with Anosov representations of Gromov hyperbolic groups. We identify the horofunction compactification of the space of projective filling currents equipped with this metric with the space of projective geodesic currents. As a consequence, we obtain a rigidity result: the metric spaces of projective filling geodesic currents associated with closed surfaces of distinct genera are not isometric.