Collar lemma for Hitchin representations

Abstract

There is a classical result known as the collar lemma for hyperbolic surfaces. A consequence of the collar lemma is that if two closed curves A and B on a closed orientable hyperbolizable surface intersect each other, then there is an explicit lower bound for the length of A in terms of the length of B, which holds for every hyperbolic structure on the surface. In this article, we prove an analog of the classical collar lemma in the setting of Hitchin representations.