Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2013
Let $T(S)$ be the Teichmüller space of a hyperbolic Riemann surface
$S$. Suppose that
$\mu $ is an extremal Beltrami differential at a given point
$\tau $ of
$T(S)$ and
$\{ {\phi }_{n} \} $ is a Hamilton sequence for
$\mu $. It is an open problem whether the sequence
$\{ {\phi }_{n} \} $ is always a Hamilton sequence for all extremal differentials in
$\tau $. S. Wu [‘Hamilton sequences for extremal quasiconformal mappings of the unit disk’, Sci. China Ser. A 42 (1999), 1033–1042] gave a positive answer to this problem in the case where
$S$ is the unit disc. In this paper, we show that it is also true when
$S$ is a doubly-connected domain.