We compute the asymptotics, as R tends to infinity, of the number of closed geodesics in Moduli space of length at most R, or equivalently the number of pseudo-Anosov elements of the mapping class group of translation length at most R.
In this article, we consider a closed rank one Riemannian manifold $M$ without focal points. Let $P(t)$ be the set of free-homotopy classes containing a closed geodesic on $M$ with length at most $t$, and $# P(t)$ its cardinality. We obtain the following Margulis-type asymptotic estimates: [lim_{tto infty}#P(t)/frac{e^{ht}}{ht}=1] where $h$ is the topological entropy of the geodesic flow. In the appendix, we also show that the unique measure of maximal entropy of the geodesic flow has the Bernoulli property.
We prove some ergodic-theoretic rigidity properties of the action of SL(2,R) on moduli space. In particular, we show that any ergodic measure invariant under the action of the upper triangular subgroup of SL(2,R) is supported on an invariant affine submanifold. The main theorems are inspired by the results of several authors on unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, and in particular by Ratners seminal work.
We prove results about orbit closures and equidistribution for the SL(2,R) action on the moduli space of compact Riemann surfaces, which are analogous to the theory of unipotent flows. The proofs of the main theorems rely on the measure classification theorem of [EMi2] and a certain isolation property of closed SL(2,R) invariant manifolds developed in this paper.
We prove a quantitative estimate, with a power saving error term, for the number of simple closed geodesics of length at most $L$ on a compact surface equipped with a Riemannian metric of negative curvature. The proof relies on the exponential mixing rate for the Teichm{u}ller geodesic flow.
We show that the geodesic period spectrum of a Riemannian 2-orbifold all of whose geodesics are closed depends, up to a constant, only on its orbifold topology and compute it. In the manifold case we recover the fact proved by Gromoll, Grove and Pries that all prime geodesics have the same length. In the appendix we partly strengthen our result in terms of conjugacy of contact forms and explain how to deduce rigidity on the real projective plane based on a systolic inequality due to Pu. (We do not use a Lusternik-Schnirelmann type theorem on the existence of at least three simple closed geodesics.)