Harmonic maps of punctured surfaces to the hyperbolic plane

In this paper, we construct polynomial growth harmonic maps from once-punctured Riemann surfaces of any finite genus to any even-sided, regular, ideal polygon in the hyperbolic plane. We also establish their uniqueness within a class of maps which differ by exponentially decaying variations. Previously, harmonic maps from once-punctured spheres to the hyperbolic plane have been parameterized by holomorphic quadratic differentials on the complex plane. Our harmonic maps, mapping a genus g>1 domain to a k-sided polygon, correspond to meromorphic quadratic differentials having one pole of order (k+2) and (4g+k-2) zeros (counting multiplicity). In this way, we can associate to these maps a holomorphic quadratic differential on the punctured Riemann surface domain. As an example, we specialize our theorems to obtain a harmonic map from a punctured square torus to an ideal square, and deduce the five possibilities for the divisor of its Hopf differential.