English

Typical geodesics on flat surfaces

Dynamical Systems 2011-02-22 v1

Abstract

We investigate typical behavior of geodesics on a closed flat surface SS of genus g2g\geq 2. We compare the length quotient of long arcs in the same homotopy class with fixed endpoints for the flat and the hyperbolic metric in the same conformal class. This quotient is asymptotically constant FF a.e. We show that FF is bounded from below by the inverse of the volume entropy e(S)e(S). Moreover, we construct a geodesic flow together with a measure on SS which is induced by the Hausdorff measure of the Gromov boundary of the universal cover. Denote by e(S)e(S) the volume entropy of SS and let cc be a compact geodesic arc which connects singularities. We show that a typical geodesic passes through cc with frequency that is comparable to exp(e(S)l(c))\exp(-e(S)l(c)). Thus a typical bi-infinite geodesic contains infinitely many singularities, and each geodesic between singularities cc appears infinitely often with a frequency proportional to exp(e(S)l(c))\exp(-e(S)l(c)).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1102.4061,
  title  = {Typical geodesics on flat surfaces},
  author = {Klaus Dankwart},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.4061},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

21 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:28:57.339Z