Invariant measures on the space of measured laminations for subgroups of mapping class group

For a non-elementary subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface, we study its invariant Radon measures on the space of measured laminations, by classifying them on the recurrent measured laminations. In particular, given a divergence-type subgroup, we show the uniquely ergodic by explicitly constructing the ergodic measure. This generalizes Lindenstrauss–Mirzakhani’s result and Hamenstädt’s result for the full mapping class group, in which case the ergodic measure is the Thurston measure. As a special case, we deduce that for a convex cocompact subgroup, every invariant ergodic Radon measure on the space of all measured laminations is either the unique measure on recurrent measured laminations, or a counting measure on the orbit of a non-recurrent measured lamination. Our method is geometric and does not rely on continuous or homogeneous flows on the ambient space or a dynamical system associated with a finite measure space. This leads to a unifying approach for various metric spaces, including Teichmüller spaces and partially $\mathrm{CAT}(-1)$ spaces.