Uniform degeneration of hyperbolic surfaces with boundary along harmonic map rays

Unique harmonic maps between surfaces give a parametrization of the Teichm\"uller space by holomorphic quadratic differentials on a Riemann surface. In this paper, we investigate the degeneration of hyperbolic surfaces corresponding to a ray of meromorphic quadratic differentials on a punctured Riemann surface in this parametrization, where the meromorphic quadratic differentials have a pole of order 2 at each puncture. We show that the rescaled distance functions of the universal covers of hyperbolic surfaces uniformly converge, on a certain non-compact region containing a fundamental domain, to the intersection number with the vertical measured foliation given by the meromorphic quadratic differential determining the direction of the ray. This implies the family of hyperbolic surfaces converges to the dual R-tree to the vertical measured foliation in the sense of Gromov-Hausdorff. As an application, we describe the limit in the function space on the set of isotopy classes of properly embedded arcs and simple closed curves on the surface.