The Loewner–Kufarev energy and foliations by Weil–Petersson quasicircles

Abstract

We study foliations by chord–arc Jordan curves of the twice punctured Riemann sphere using the Loewner–Kufarev equation. We associate to such a foliation a function on the plane that describes the “local winding” along each leaf. Our main theorem is that this function has finite Dirichlet energy if and only if the Loewner driving measure has finite Loewner–Kufarev energy, defined by