A high-genus asymptotic expansion of Weil-Petersson volume polynomials

Abstract: The object under consideration in this article is the total volume $V_{g,n}(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ of the moduli space of hyperbolic surfaces of genus $g$ with $n$ boundary components of lengths $x_1, \ldots, x_n$, for the Weil-Petersson volume form. We prove the existence of an asymptotic expansion of the quantity $V_{g,n}(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ in terms of negative powers of the genus $g$, true for fixed $n$ and any $x_1, \ldots, x_n \geq 0$. The first term of this expansion appears in work of Mirzakhani and Petri (2019), and we compute the second term explicitly. The main tool used in the proof is Mirzakhani's topological recursion formula, for which we provide a comprehensive introduction.